I love Lord of the Rings, my favourite books. It has so much of an old fairy tale, it's beautiful and I have never again read something that makes me dive into a different world. Only these books can do that to me. I see the points made here though. It's just a love it or hate thing really.
Andrew, I think the great thing about the story is not the storyline itself but the individual stories and the way every detail was thought through. Each and every character has a story of its own. You could literally write books on those as well. As has happended with The Silmarilion but I couldn't completely read that, was just too long-winded.
Anyway, the point why it is such a great work is the dedication that went into it. Think about the language of Elvish - there are dictionaries about it and even recordings of Tolkien speaking it. You can of course endlessly discuss whether it is really a language that you can just simply learn....constructed languages rarely work in all aspects of life. But the fact that they hired people for the films who taught the actors to speak it shows that there are genuine rules to it.
I think it's a very original and exeptional work. Maybe not the storyline (and yeah I know Tolkien stole here and there from ancient germanic legends) but the whole thing definitely is exeptional
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