They had 73 endings, they could have fitted the War and Peace in easily. They took the Tom Bombadil stuff out because even they could see it's tedious beyond measure. Tolkien created a world but couldn't stop being boring about it. I like The Hobbit - it's fast and the plot points for other more boring shite doesn't get in the way. LotR is at best twice as long as it should be. The rest...
I think it would be hard to choose to write a more boring book than The Silmarillion.
That'll be where we differ, NS.
In his intro to a later edition of LOTR, the author admitted that some of his correspondants were correct - LOTR was too short!
Much of his imaginary world had been created whilst he was in the trenches of WWI; the vast histories, languages, many of the legends had been put on paper before 'The Hobbit' which was in essence a bedtime story for his son, was published in 1937. More work on the First and Second Ages followed during the second world war, before 'Fellowship" was published.
That's why, after his death, his son, Christopher - himself, like his father, a linguistic expert - spent decades putting most of the vast amounts of notes together, and we now have six further volumes which delve deep into the mistique of Tolkien's world, incorporating his vast knowledge of pre-Christian Celtic, Norse and Saxon poetic styles.
