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Originally Posted by davem
Certainly, the massive popularity of LotR over the Sil says a great deal about our age. I daresay if the novels had been published 500 years ago the Sil would have been the more popular work.
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Not sure on that. To me the difficulty of the Sil is that it reads more like a text book than a novel, and so it's not the information contained therein that is problematic but the presentation of the same. In LotR you walk along with Frodo (for the most part) and see the world through his journey. In the Sil you tend to jump around more, and I would assume that more people favor the stories in the Sil that are more complete and self-contained.
And surely others have noticed the repetitiveness of the Sil stories - the long defeat - and so might be put off by that. Also like some parts of the Christian Bible, not many lay readers are interested in lists of 'begats.' Does anyone else skip over the detailed description of Numenor after reading it the first time?
So I would guess that it's a writing style, not the answers to life's questions, that put people off.
And to be sure, does anyone know where we can find at least two literate 500 year old persons?
