LOL Love history and so did Tolkien so that could be the issue. I remember reading “The Tell” and loved it. Gave sci-fi up (and most reading except the Bible and FR) a looooong time ago. History channel is ok but current events are not unlike reading about wars and rumors of wars so that could be why I don’t have to read fiction. Read the Hobbit and LOTR in the fall of 7 consecutive years back in the late 70’s early 80’s.
I love fantasy fiction, but I hate Tolkien, his writing is boring and slow moving, lets spend 5-10 pages describing the scenery, then have 2 paragraphs of plot movement..
Just not my cup of tea, and honestly I found the films based on his books just as slow moving, drawn out and boring as well.. the First movie in particular, whenever they finally did get to something that remotely resembled action, lets show it in super super slow motion to make it just as boring as possible.
I know their making money hand over fist on these, but for me, I find Tolkien’s books incredibly poor examples of the Genre. I respect them since they started the genre, but they are just not great reading.
If I were to have the $$ and decision making, I’d go after Dragonlance Chronicles to make into movies.. CGI is now to the level you could do this story justice, not sure why this has never been done... They did do some direct to video animation adaptations of it, but still shocked with things that have gotten movies in this Genre, this series still hasn’t. And if I wanted to do an EPIC I would probably try to tackle Memory, Sorrow and Thorn.