[Rikae]

I don't think I mean this quite the same way Davem does, but I don't think of the books as fantasy, either. To me, the fantasy genre followed Tolkien, and was a pale attempt to imitate him by incorporating superficial "window dressing" - wizards, dragons, elves, etc.; while what Tolkien wrote was a myth (perhaps the only myth ever "written" by a single author.) I mean myth in the sense of archetypes, of stories that are "more than true", not in the modern sense of "false". In that sense, what Tolkien wrote could not be further from "fantasy"...it is not even quite "fiction".

To stay on topic...I think the movies did manage to communicate some of the mythic quality of LOTR, but they were contaminated and dimished by the filmmakers' tendency to confuse Tolkien with fantasy.