I remember reading this book when I was 11 or 12 years old and absolutely loving it. The epic scope of the story, the adventure, the whimsical tone had me hooked.
Finally decided to reread this a few decades later and to my disappointment this has not aged as well as I had hoped. The language has changed significantly since this was written and found myself struggling with clunky sentences and descriptions. There were moments where Tolkien describes something to only brush it aside as unimportant and parts he hurriedly fast forwards where days and weeks are compressed into a paragraph as if he himself was getting bored writing the story. It reads like a story that should be told by the fire rather than read. My recommendation is for anyone looking to read this to go for an audiobook version as it will be certainly more enjoyable in my opinion.
Surprisingly, I found the star of the book is the world that Tolkien describes. The hills, rivers, mountains, the woods, are all described in a way that makes the world feel real. In contrast the characters are rather dull and uninspired. There’s definitely value in slogging through this to look back on the beginnings of the modern fantasy genre and realize how far it has come.