/lit/ - Literature

>the stout Hobbits are called... STOORS!
>the Hobbit names are Bilbo, and Frodo, and his father Drogo and... DORA AND ESMERALDA AND ISABELLA!
>Proudfoots, the Hobbits with the BIG F E E T, alongside the Dingleberries and Danginwaggins and Jinglejangies
BRAVO TOLKIEN, THE MASTER OF MYTH!

I'm 1 chapter into this and I'm already feeling my braincells dying. I already powered through the Hobbit last year, and figured his magnum opus would be better, but the advancement is minimal. He spent 10 pages on fictional Hobbit "history" which was basically
>there were these stout guys, these faggy guys and these browny guys, and they were stupid but not too stupid, but we don't know anything because nothing was written down, but we know they settled here and there; now let me stretch that and repeat everything
Do you people really enjoy prose peppered with inconsequential dates from made-up calendars including made-up notes based on made-up history and on and on? This is less a story and more like a proto-AO3 genealogy, but written by someone trying too hard to be poetic while writing on an Elementary school level.

I can see the appeal to autists and people looking to waste hours on details, basically searching for a timesink to obsess over, but I see not its value for an average person. All fiction is useless on a base level, that's not my problem. It's that if I'm not getting beautiful prose, an interesting plot, cool characters or anything to at least waste my time with style, what's the point? You pick up a Conan story, you're immediately immersed, you go on a ride and bam, an hour well-spent. This is like reading a lore wiki with some descriptions peppered in and very stilted dialogue. Everything drags on while not moving the story forward, or at the very least describing something beautiful and unique. But no, just forests and plains and the same things repeating over and over. I've already seen the movies so I skipped around to check how certain scenes compare, but again, the dialogue remains stilted and basic, and the rest is background coverage mixed with autistic made-up thesaurus info drops.

The worst part is that it's not even some imagined tale. It's bastardized Nordic stuff with some Christianity mixed in. He's lauded as some great worldbuilder with consistent philology, but you've got Hobbits named Frodo, Ordo, and then Sancho, Isabella and Sam. What sense does that make? You go from Boromir and Faramir, to just a guy named Arago(r)n. It's this weird mix of made-up nonsense and random explicit real-world insertions that clash against one another, making the whole thing come off as a farce.

These are three 400+ page books, they're not something small. Is there a point in continuing, do interesting characters come forth, does the prose get better, or is this it? Because I have to say, for the work lauded as some modern-day Iliad, I'm seeing only a kindergarten story but written by the 1900s equivalent of a fanfic worldbuilding autist.