Alternatively Tolkein was a self-oppressed withdrawn pothead who got high on cheap opium and wrote about the naked elves he saw down his garden
Seriously, though, I found LOTR wearing, and not just because I have a short attention span. Where a contemporary would have written "and so Frodo Baggins journeyed out of the shire", JRR manages to drag it out into 2 chapters complete with botanical descriptions of the various plants on the way and "epic ballads" (the poems/songs everyone skips over) dreamed up in his more intense spliff sessions.
Actually had he not felt the need to pad out a good story with quasi-mythological twaddle such as the allegedly Anglo-Saxon "elvish" names that seem to inject a sort of Star Trek level of absurdity into a great work of literature, and streamlined the narrative a bit, it would probably be highly regarded in its own right as a "Great", not just in the wake of the recent movie.
Great film... great toilet roll.