reading lord of the rings in 2024

[sanctumsys]

[very minor spoilers for the treason of isengard, aka book 3 of 6 or book 2 of 3 if you have the trilogy edition]

the "reading lord of the rings in 2024" experience is constantly encountering things that simultaneously make you go "oh, so that's where that fantasy trope came from" and "this worldbuilding is so good i'm annoyed that nothing else i've ever read has ever even tried to be this believable before".
the realization hit in book three when ents show up. did you know ents are way more interesting than just being tree people? i didn't until a day or two ago and now i feel like every other piece of fantasy media i've ever seen or read is flat in comparison
it's like playing the first two zeldas and realizing a bunch of the later ones (mostly the 3D ones) kind of turn an improvisational wandering adventure into a series of locked doors with increasingly elaborate keys. how have i never encountered worldbuilding this good from things that are ostensibly inspired by tolkien? it's like everything else just takes the surface level and doesn't bother with the good shit

[RT-55J]

man, I haven't read LotR since I was like 15. I've watched the movies several times, but those probably (definitely) aren't as culturally enriching in the same way. I'd probably appreciate the poetry a lot more these days, at least.

Tolkien is cool because he drew from the incredibly wide well of real world history, language, and myth to inform his work, rather than the more narrow pool of popular genre fiction. Like, insofar as a lot of fantasy authors make up a lot of history, language, and myth for their fantasy worlds, very few of them seem to have the same level of interest in those things as Papa Tolkien did.

[sanctumsys]

i feel like part of it may have been that there wasn't really tropes to rely on? or at least, being the creator of something that's only seen as a trope in hindsight you get a lot of control over how to represent that. like how a lot of fantasy worlds have ents with the reliance on your cultural foreknowledge that they're tree people
but you can absolutely tell he had a love for history and language and the setting is so rich for it. not to say the present-day story of it feels secondary but it feels like the history of the world comes into play in ways history rarely does in fiction
it's a book for writers, or rather it's a book that makes me want to write