They do different things, IMO. The movies are cinematic masterpieces and are designed specifically to keep you entranced for every single moment. A lot of the slower slice of life moments and less intense character interactions are cut out. They’re also made for our era’s audience.
Tolkien was from a different era of authors, books from previous generations sometimes feel difficult or challenging to read because our languages evolve rather rapidly. Pride and Prejudice was the pinnacle of the trendy everyman’s novel back when it first came out and now it’s prestigious classic literature that many people find boring. Canterbury Tales was entertaining court poetry when Chauser wrote the stories and now they teach entire semester long courses on how to just comprehend that era’s vernacular. This dissonance between our modern vernacular and the vernacular of the time of writing can make older books feel slow, dry, and difficult to read because we have to take slightly more time to comprehend it. It’s like trying to read your grandma’s shopping list. It’s words you know but the handwriting back when she was young was just so different and it takes a little bit more effort to read it than if you or your friend wrote it. When I was in elementary school we learned cursive and never wrote in print.
LOTR in 1937 is kinda like today’s Witcher novels, or maybe Game of Thrones or Outlander or Mistborn. Once you get used to Tolkien’s writing style and your brain stops stumbling over the language they’re incredibly vivid, immersive books. In a movie all that work of imagining what’s happening during battle and what the imposing castles and expansive magical forests look like is done for you and you just have to sit there. Of course watching chopper footage of a police chase is going to be more immediately stimulating than reading about it in the newspaper the next day.
They do different things, IMO. The movies are cinematic masterpieces and are designed specifically to keep you entranced for every single moment. A lot of the slower slice of life moments and less intense character interactions are cut out. They’re also made for our era’s audience.
Tolkien was from a different era of authors, books from previous generations sometimes feel difficult or challenging to read because our languages evolve rather rapidly. Pride and Prejudice was the pinnacle of the trendy everyman’s novel back when it first came out and now it’s prestigious classic literature that many people find boring. Canterbury Tales was entertaining court poetry when Chauser wrote the stories and now they teach entire semester long courses on how to just comprehend that era’s vernacular. This dissonance between our modern vernacular and the vernacular of the time of writing can make older books feel slow, dry, and difficult to read because we have to take slightly more time to comprehend it. It’s like trying to read your grandma’s shopping list. It’s words you know but the handwriting back when she was young was just so different and it takes a little bit more effort to read it than if you or your friend wrote it. When I was in elementary school we learned cursive and never wrote in print.
LOTR in 1937 is kinda like today’s Witcher novels, or maybe Game of Thrones or Outlander or Mistborn. Once you get used to Tolkien’s writing style and your brain stops stumbling over the language they’re incredibly vivid, immersive books. In a movie all that work of imagining what’s happening during battle and what the imposing castles and expansive magical forests look like is done for you and you just have to sit there. Of course watching chopper footage of a police chase is going to be more immediately stimulating than reading about it in the newspaper the next day.