Did LOTR need more action?

[Mnemosyne]

It all depends on what the battles are being used for.

Fact of the matter is, LotR is not meant to be an "exciting" book. It's supposed to be intense, and unfortunately adding in superfluous battle scenes distracts from the intensity of, say, the battle over a hobbit's soul.

Tolkien was masterful at using fight sequences to portray what he wanted to portray. Helm's Deep, for instance, is important because 1). it's the turning point in the fight against Saruman, and 2). it develops the characters of Theoden, Eomer, Aragorn (who challenges the Uruk-hai), Legolas, and Gimli. It's also a part of Gandalf's Master Plan, so we need to see all the pieces coming together. Then there's the additional empathy we get for Rohan, which sets up for the confrontation with Saruman in "The Voice of Saruman." We were there when the King found out about Hama's body being hewn even after he was struck down.

See, in Tolkien (unlike Jackson, I might add), battles are a means to an end, not an end in themselves--they serve the higher purposes of plot, not to mention character. Every time a battle scene was longer than it had to be in the films, that meant that much less time for character development*. In a book, you're not limited by time like that, but too much of a superfluous thing adds clutter and detracts from the main conflict**.

If excitement were all that Tolkien was after, why didn't he describe the Battle of Bywater more? I'd argue it was because to do so would have detracted from the simple, anonymous pathos of nineteen hobbits killed. Yeah, it's not the same thing as an epic battle, but there's this innocence lost. We're supposed to identify with hobbits, and to turn their loss--the personal loss of the in-universe recorders of the tale--into something exciting is tragic.

So no, LOTR didn't need more action, because action is not what LOTR is about. If people have a problem with characters walking and talking and living in this beautiful, fictional world, I suggest that they entertain themselves with Conan the Barbarian or some other, more visceral work.

*One of the bigger problems in the films, as evidenced by the fact that they cut the Choices of Master Samwise in favor of keeping the audience in the dark about the Ring's fate just a little bit longer... as if no one could tell that it was going to be okay in the end!

**This, and the fact that none of the characters were sympathetic anymore, is why I stopped reading Wheel of Time.