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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3489430" data-attributes="member: 4937">I agree with that.  As supporting evidence, I would offer that it is exactly what Tolkien said about the work.  As far as JRRT was concerned, the book was about the Hobbits and the story of the Hobbits was about mercy.Yes.  Quite so.  But it is mostly an exercise in worldbuilding.  As others have pointed out, an excercise in worldbuilding does not a finished novel make, and the book as published in no way should be thought of as reflecting exactly what Tolkien wanted to do with the work.  For example, the Silmarrilion story fleshed out and made into actual novels, easily encompasses three stories each comparable to the LotR in scale.    First of all, I don't agree that the movies jettisoned very much worldbuilding stuff at all.  And second of all, whatever the movies did, I don't agree that it didn't suffer much by comparison.  So, to begin with, I think all of your assumptions are flawed.Improve on the book?  You think the movies improved on the book?  Well, I guess you are entitled to your opinion.This however is the kind of thing which leads me to completely discount your opinion.  If you had said, "'The Fellowship of the Ring' I found a dull book which dragged, where as the movie propelled the plot forward by eschewing so much exposition about the past.", I might have some sympathy for your position because at least it would have somewhat fit the facts.  I fully agree that 'Fellowship' can be a very slow book, in which maybe as much as a third of the text consists of building up the backstory to the story through various devices - including a lot of songs, poems, and so forth.  It is not a 'tightly' written book, and the author admits to various endulgances for his own amusement, for example the aforementioned Tom B.  But the thing is, by the time you get to 'The Two Towers' (not Twin, Two, since they are in no way twins), Tolkien has covered his bases and the story begins to move with great haste toward its conclusion.  'The Two Towers' is a lean, mean, book and the only reason it is so 'long' (though much shorter than Fellowship) is that the story Tolkien is now telling after all this set up is so complex.  There is almost no exposition and world building in 'The Two Towers', very few songs break out, and when they do they aren't long elven lays.  We get very brief descriptions of places in order to set the scene, but since there are only a dozen or so places and none of the descriptions amount to more than a page, the entire time spent 'world building' in Two Towers is a tiny fraction of the story by this point.I tell you what a lot of readers in my experience that have no trouble with 'Fellowship' do get bored with though when they get to Two Towers.  The story itself, and in particular the central story of the book regarding the three Hobbits - Frodo, Sam, and Smeagol/Gollum.  The largest section of 'Two Towers' is an exploration of the relationship between those three characters, and not a lot of exciting battles, monsters, and so forth show up for a comparitively long stretch of chapters as Tolkien starts digging deeply into these characters.  A lot of people that breeze through 'Fellowship' because for all its world building, its got exciting fights and chase scenes and lots of heroics going on, simply bog down in the second half of 'Two Towers'.On the other hand, a lot of people that give up the story in disgust during 'Fellowship' because of all the exposition and backstory and discussion of whose ancestor did what and who all these seemingly endless characters Tolkien is adding to the story are, once they make it to 'Two Towers', once the whole cast is in place, and Tolkien finally begins advancing the plot apace are swept away by the story which formerly seemed so dull.  My wife for example had this experience.  To her, 'Fellowship' seemed to stretch on forever, and she was bored to tears through Moria (which many people who are bored by Two Towers adore), but once she plowed through that 'boring part' (in her opinion) and got to the meat of the story she hardly put the book down until it was finished.  And what's really interesting is that it is in Two Towers that PJ makes the editorial decision to add several (four or five actually) new events to the story all of which require extra time on screen to play out, and none of which advance the story in any way.  PJ makes the story in 'Two Towers' less tight, in favor of adding alot of combat scenes and short duration tension to the story and at the expense of alot of character dialogue (about the characters, not setting narration, which as I said plays a small role only in TT).</blockquote>

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