Great post and analysis. 👍🏻
this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (LotR), etc.
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Getting a boner from Gandalf is natural.
Edit: sorry didn't read the body of the post.
Sir this is a Wendy's
formatting: learn it, use it, love it.
its the same with the books... you spend so much time with them that when its over it feels like its own, parallel journey.
It's a lot quicker than reading it! It's nearly half a million words, over if you include The Hobbit/Silmarillion.
Someone was claiming that the early chapters (I think it was the Old Forest stuff, after they left the Shire) were purposely written in a dense, slow style to make the reader really feel the weary progress. I don't think I believe that, but it's an interesting possibility.
that it’s the kind of story that should seem like it takes forever
I mean, that's literally the point of the books...
For all the talk of Sauran's eye, he had to have ring wraiths track them and rely on such primitive methods as harassing crotchety old hobbits at their turnip farms.
Throw Frodo on the back of an Eagle, fly over the volcano and toss it in before anyone knew what was happening or it started to corrupt Frodo.
Like, the big excuse was always Frodo needed the journey to toughen up, but the reality is the journey took like fucking years and in the time it would have taken to fly there he'd never have used it to or had it long enough to be corrupted. Because by the end of it Sam basically had to do it.
But if an eagle can carry armored Dwarves or a full grown Gandalf, Sam could have rode bitch on the same eagle.
The real reason the story is so long, is Tolkein was a linguist who made up a language to stay sane in WW1, then after the fact wrote some books to justify the effort.
Which meshes with the excuse. The books aren't so long because the story needed them to be. They're so long and vivid because Tolkein needed them to be. He dealt with the absolute horrors of WW1 by sinking into this fantasy world. Coping methods don't go away when the situation does, so after the war getting lost in Middle Earth was preferable to PTSD before we knew how to treat it.
He'd spend 10 pages describing a door, because that hyper focus on his fantasy world kept out the images of WW1 that were literally and figuratively haunting his entire generation.