"Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."

4.5 stars. After so many fruitless efforts to re-read this didn't seem to take off, I decided at the end of last year that 2021 would be the year. Luckily, I found a Finnish group read where people were enthusiastic, knowledgeable, supportive, and fun, so doing this with them felt less daunting and more rewarding.

The movies have always been my absolute favorites, but at my heart I'm a horror girl. High fantasy isn't the genre I feel most at home in (and if I dabble in it sometimes, it's through movies). I don't know if it's because I'm now 18 years older (wow), because I haven't seen the movies for who knows how many years, or because I read this in English, but this time I was able to tolerate the slow parts much better. There were still moments where I felt defeated, but they managed to simply melt into parts of the journey. All journeys inevitably have them.

So many more things outshined the gratuitous details: the descriptions of a slow and oppressive approach of darkness, the friendships, the depictions of corruption of power, the incredibly extensive world-building (for good and ill), fascinating villains, the heroism of unassuming people... Middle-earth felt more and more like a real world I didn't want to leave. More importantly, even though there's a clear dichotomy between good and evil (often to an uncomfortable degree), there are occasions when characters show glimpses of fallibility or uncertainty.

I may not be a hard-core admirer of The Lord of the Rings to the point that I would read it dozens of times, learn Elvish, or consider Tolkien as a completely unique fantasy author, but for me personally The Lord of the Rings has done to epic fantasy what H. G. Wells did to sci-fi: I'm more open to dive into worlds unknown. And maybe the timing was just right in more ways than one: "But in the end it's only a passing thing, this shadow; even darkness must pass".