Shoudl I read The Hobbit then LOTR, or LOTR then The Hobbit?

Are any wags going to suggest the Silmarillion?

And you know what? When faced with the dilemma of reading and not reading something, reading it always wins. So go read The Hobbit and then LoTR.

They're both kids books Kate!

No.

Kate that kind of attitude is taking away children's precious childhood as surely as Cosmo Girl and Bratz! [/handwringing Guardian layMoR]

Ned I cannot begin to guess how many re-readings you are talking of!

The Hobbit was published in 1937, 17 years before The Fellowship of The Ring.

Go read the damn book already.

You are wise.

Kate that kind of attitude is taking away children's precious childhood as surely as Cosmo Girl and Bratz!

What attitude? Huh? There are things in The Hobbit that scared me when I was 6 that I laughed at when I was 12. I tried to read LOTR when I was 6, and was too over my head (and scared by the Black Riders) to get very into it. Certain books are more suitable for certain age groups, what's Guardian reader about that?

lotr is a long-winded bore suitable for people who lurk around elementary schools in long coats and black socks.

WTF? HOW?

ha ha read as: silmarillion is for hard-ons only

So that's what Gil-galad's spear is all about

(And then I discovered Duran Duran and pop stars and BOYS and I got a life!)

Very carefully.

And then I discovered Duran Duran and pop stars and BOYS and I got a life!

Hm...I discovered Duran Duran and pop stars first and then read LOTR after it. That must be the answer.

Madchen learns to read aged 4. Madchen starts school as a rising five. Madchen's teacher makes her start again at Peter and Jane book 1a!!! Hence I did not read the Hobbit until I was 11. (Enid Blyton addiction may also have held me back)

I think liking the Silmarillion might be more evidence that I had a very narrow escape from gothdom.

Or else, you are even more MAJORLY SAD.
-- Citizen Kate (masonicboo...), November 27th, 2003.

Or
1) u r a student (u lucky bastard)
2) you are enrique and thinking about writing something at an ill-defined point in the future

Ricardo yes we were very cute, my dad always wanted us to be like the Swiss Family Robinson or something, cheerfully doing chores and coming up with brilliant gardening ideas

My semi-little-known secret -- my first NaNoWriMo entry, Complex, very specifically borrows a general structure from The Hobbit. The eventual sequel which I've been toying for some time will indeed be modelled on LOTR in turn. However, I couldn't actually ever attempt to write an epic fantasy straight up.

David Salo -- I love that guy! He's Mr. "Yeah I'm a Nerd and I Don't Care" -- he's actually happily married and is either studying or has his PhD now, so I'm all for him.

Yay! In my case it was only the 50,000 (now 75,000) words and the reason I did the borrowing of the structure was because I am terrible at coming up with basic structures of my own (though NaNoWriMo experiences since have given me more practice at it). As for it being a bad idea in general, I'm hardly James Joyce but I refer you to Ulysses.

Read them "The Hobbit" when they're little, casually tell them that LOTR exists later on.

Elaborate plz Mark

LOTR had declared that hobbit-types were relatively new to the world, so a small cosy people couldn't anyway be written into the tale of beren wresting a silmaril from morgoth (haha could he be any more morgoth?)'s crown in thangorodrim

you can tell by the feel of the writing that he has come to love and prefer the small cosy (or anti-cosy) people in LoTR *more* than all their high noble elf-betters: the dialogue relaxes, the situations are funny and much more psychologically perceptive (ie i take ned's line abt aragorn's deep doubts and all but you have to fish for it more); the entire section of conflicted gollum with sam and frodo is leagues ahead of all the rohirrim stuff, for example

writing the silmarillion with a craftsmans's joy - being true to the nature of his skill - meant either pursuing this small-people aspect, the angle he realised he had a mastery of, or mastering something else (High Prose Edda Rip-off, which I think by thes 50s he deep down realised WASN'T his metier, tho he deeply loved it still and carried on trying... he WAS a modern man not a 10th century norseman)

contrast the tale of years sections of the LoTR appendix with the actual text where hobbits and gollum appear: for LoTR to come to life it had to stop being "tale of years"-like, and did... but the silmarillion never did, because he couldn't find the gollum/hobbit-element that held him close to vivid storytelling

OTM, and compare to how in the second film all the running around and surfing down stairs in Helms Deep comes in second to the simple betrayal of Smeagol by Frodo. Er, in my opinion.

I do not think (The Silmarillion) would have the appeal of the L.R. -- no hobbits! Full of mythology, and elvishness, and all that 'heigh stile' (as Chaucer might say), which has been so little to the taste of many reviewers.

I was just thinking about the movies, since the world premiere of Return is tomorrow, and it occurs to me that Jackson's decision to prioritize the close-up and personal interaction is his own equivalent to Tolkien's focus on the 'small' if you like. The films could have been pure spectacle but they they would be nowhere near as good, I'd guess, and that close-up focus is precisely why the Smeagol/Gollum confrontation scene both works and makes cinematic sense in the story as filmed.

About 1/3rd of the way through the book, I thought "My god, this is twee." Then it gets weird, then it gets good, then it turns into ye old stylee language, then it goes twee again. I gave it 4 stars out of 5 in Amazon.

All in all, I'm glad I read it before LOTR. Good work, ILXors!

You're a funny chap, Neg Raggett.

reading the hobbit to my 7 yr old, worried it would be too old timey and slow but it really does zip along, dwarves to trolls to elves to goblins to gollum to wolves to eagles to beorn with scarcely a pause. it does slow down a bit after that. (i read it enough times in my youth but couldn't recall the pacing.) a thousand times more pleasurable to read than bloody potter.

A children's bookshop owner mentioned this as a possible follow-up and apparently an inspiration - never heard of it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marvellous_Land_of_Snergs

Intrigued to know how you get on with the last quarter - obviously the Smaug bits are great, but I struggled with the bits after that, which get a bit RPG sourcebook. I’m guessing it’s much better in smaller bedtime doses.

Unrelatedly, I’m just reading Charmed Life which I bet would be fabulous for a 7-year-old, and obviously better than Potter too. My three year old knows Harry Potter is a thing, but not what it is, she just likes randomly shouting “Harry Potter!” when she’s trying to avoid bedtime.

was Tolkien anti-TERF

If people are rejecting Rowling on the basis of TERFness were Tolkien's politics any better.

Luckily we will never know how much he would have doubled down on his possible prejudices when pressed on social media. I also reject rowling on the basis of her books being shit.

The last 1/4 was certainly less fun, no 7 year old could be interested in the Phantom Menace opening crawl of the post-smaug politics; we then read the siege and battle in one go which was probably too much. She was playing around as I was reading and I normally try and put a stop to that but this time I thought eh can't blame you. The battle is a slog to read, especially as Tolkien goes full on 'ere long' olde englishe, not only in reported speech but as a narrator.

Just read Gormenghast and forget Tolkien

im usually a why not both kind of guy but gormenghast was a slog until i threw it away, quite early into it and all

xpost hey now.

Glad she had a (mostly) good experience! As for Tolkien's politics, yeah, kinda glad he's safely in the past on the one hand (can imagine him and Brexit; then again he also died before the UK even joined), but on the other, when it comes to TERFness, my podcast cohosts and I honestly delight in remembering that the angelic powers of Middle-earth, the Valar, are pretty much explicitly stated to have utterly plastic 'true' forms that aren't even gendered; they take on gendered shapes just to make things easier for Elves and Men rather than anything innate. This doubtless comes more from Tolkien's tradCath ways about angels in general, but it's a nicely accidental point of distinction from Rowling's fuckery.

I’ve been reading Beatrix Potter for my (much younger) daughter, and she is somehow an infinitely more tedious and longwinded writer than Tolkien, even while operating at a much lower level of complexity. So everything’s relative. I don’t know if she was a TERF but she sounds like she was a piece of work.

Poor use of commas. I mean Potter is a tedious writer, not my three year old.