It was weird to realize that the books and movies were about different things

The movies are about the characters and their struggles to try and beat Sauron obviously

But the books got a lot more interesting when I started looking at them as the stories of a world and its history and the way that that world handled to coming and going of another dark lord. The threats he posed to peaceful places, the peace broken simply by his presence, and also the people and places legitimately above and outside Sauron’s reach. The fact that Sam’s star or Tom Bombadil would look at this great and terrible evil, the worst ever known to so many in the world, and to them it would be but another passing of an era, the opening of a new story dated to end like all the rest.

The scale and perspective of it all is just so dramatically different that I can’t help but feel like reaching that perspective is half the journey for the reader.