lmp - I agree with you that I don't read Lord of the Rings as an action/adventure either, but to be fair on PJ, not every book fan is like us! For one, a friend of mine says he enjoys the action and the adventure most of all in the story, and that's what he centres on (plus he likes all the weapons
) - he hasn't seen the films for the simple fact that he's blind!
I wonder how much PJ brought out the other aspects that we get from the book? Maybe only someone who saw the films first could answer that properly as we will have watched with 'an agenda', like it or not!
I also wonder how someone who was introduced to Tolkien via the films first would see Gollum in the text? More or less sympathetically? My own personal introduction to the fella was via the pages of the Hobbit and although I found him really frightening because he had scared poor Bilbo to death, after reading Rings I began to find him much more sympathetic and began to feel quite sorry for him - and over time this feeling has only grown. Would my reaction be more or less like someone who met him via the films?