Interesting. I had sort of forgotten that LOTR was written as a side project from the Silmarillion due to interest in a sequel to the Hobbit. I think that's what's always tainted my enjoyment of LOTR... I did really enjoy the Hobbit as a cracking good adventure story and I also really like the Silmarillion as a truly unique and encyclopedic approach to myth-making. LOTR, as a hybrid, has never worked for me. For me, it's too wordy and into lineages and the like to be a really great adventure but also too brief to really provide the context needed to enjoy it as a slice of a greater story.
Regarding the former, it's BORING... Helm's Deep and Pelennor Fields are barely a chapter each. Ditto for Moria. But we get about 10 chapters detailing EVERY swamp Frodo walked through and every person that died in it while the ONLY exciting thing that happens is Frodo falls in the water once... all scenes that were beefed up in the movie just to make it seem like something interesting happens.
I've still never read any of the appendixes, because the very notion of that is absurd to me. It's basically Tolkien getting to the end and being like "oh yeah, I forgot I never said a word about where the heck Aragorn marrying Arwen came from." Apparently, that couldn't have been handled in a way that would make sense in an actual novel that's telling a story (like adding it to Rivendell in book 1), so he decided to create an appendix to explain a bunch of stuff that was otherwise incomprehensible. It's sloppy, bad writing if you're going for a novel/story. It only works if you're writing an encyclopedia or family history (ie. the Silmarillion). That's not even touching on Faramir and Eowyn's romance being obviously shoe-horned in late in the series as a romance as Tolkien realized his book was dreadfully boring and offered no characters to root for other than Sam and Gandalf.
I think at the time, it was such a novel concept, that the notion of depth in his fantasy world was sufficient to carry it (the way the mere use of deep focus made Citizen Kane a classic film despite it being pretty boring in anything other than a technical sense, or Star Wars demonstrated that special effects could truly bring space to life even if in retrospect it's a thin story with a lot of kitsch). But in the end I feel that, looking back, Hobbit and Silmarillion are far better works in the way they commit to what they are. His attempt to bridge the gaps between them in LOTR falls short. I can often tell that LOTR is really just another 2-3 chapters of the Silmarillion, expanded in the same way Peter Jackson broke the Hobbit out. He didn't WANT to write another "novel" in this world, and it very much shows in conscious efforts to avoid the excitement of the Hobbit in favor of the dry historical background of the Silmarillion. The trouble is that while Jackson was good at teasing out conflict (Helm's Deep, giving Aragorn and his backstory more explicit context, Gollum's internal battle), Tolkien seems afraid to inject much fun into his proceedings, lest it be viewed as too childish.
Fantasy has run with this for a long time, churning out epic doorstopper after epic doorstopper and viewing any fantasy that is self-contained as trite. So you get things like Robert E Howard being viewed as little more than the inspiration for some cheesy Arnold Schwartzenegger flicks, while Robert Jordan gets a book deal that literally carries him to his death bed. Or there's Brandon Sanderson: he did one very good and interesting standalone fantasy that got scant attention (Elantris). So he wrote a bigger trilogy to get some cred, landed the gig wrapping up WoT, and then immediately inked a deal for yet another massive 10-book series where book one is 1100 pages. Meanwhile, Chris Wooding write a series of some of the most engaging standalone adventures I ever read, and his series is already dead because there's no "hook" when the story actually FINISHES at the end of a book. It's soap opera for fantasy nerds really, as publishers begin to realize the real money isn't in publishing works that are new and challenging like LOTR was then, but in getting nerds hooked on the next installment of a never-ending saga.
In a meta sense, I would argue that LOTR would never be published in the post-LOTR fantasy world. They'd tell Tolkien there's no real hero, and unless he pads out Aragorn and Arwen's romance (which he can't do because he doesn't write dialogue well, it's all stilted speech patterns taken from Beowulf and the like), no book deal. Instead, he'd probably get pushed to write LOTR as one 1000-page book in a much longer series that would cover basically all of the Silmarillion, or to draw LOTR out into 10 books so we get every conversation Aragon and Arwen ever had. He'd have been told to give Sauron more depth and a backstory, etc etc. It's not great as an epic doorstopper because it's incomplete, but it's no good as an adventure because it's too dry. I think its reputation is based far more on its novelty and its impact than on its actual merits, and both of his other books are better. I get what he was trying to do with LOTR, but it was really only created because the world wasn't (and probably still isn't) ready for the Silmarillion, which is imho a much better example of the mythical world-building he was trying to accomplish in LOTR.
