How old were you?

Darn it I’m old!
I read The Hobbit at 12... and that was 40 years ago!

I read LotR at about 15, The Silmarillion at ~16, then The Book of Lost Tales and the volumes of HoME as they were published.

I’ve still never read any of Tolkien’s non-Arda work, but I think I will be doing soon.

Phew! At least one person here was older than I was when first reading LoTR.
German translation at age 27, original at just under 30, and the last “new” book was “The Fall of Gondolin” last year at 62. I’ve read LoTR 15 plus times (last time a year or two ago, so at 60 or over).

I was 9 or 10 when I first read Lord of the Rings. I did it after seeing either FotR or RotK in cinema. Hobbit, however, waited much longer - I only read it few years later. EDIT: I am yet to read it in English, though.

I was 9 years old when read LOTR in Russian. Then read Hobbit and tried to read The Silmarillion at 11 (also in Russian). All of these I read in English at 18 years old

12 when I read LoTR, then straight on to The Silmarillion, then the Hobbit. Probably the wrong way round to read the books!

I read The Hobbit when I was 13, and read LOTR the summer I turned 14. I have read and reread both books too many times to count. I read the Sil when it first came out in paperback and the Unfinished Tales when it first came out. I was lucky enough to find a hardback copy of The Letters of JRR Tolkien at a garage sale, practically new and bought it for 50 cents!!! I felt I found gold!!!

I was 8 when I read The Hobbit. I tried to read LOTR not long after, but I only made it through a chapter or two - it was still a bit beyond me. I finally finished it all when I was 14 or 15, then read The Silmarillion and The Children of Húrin right after.

I've reread The Hobbit and LOTR multiple times, but still need to go back and do the others again.

I was 45

King Elf said:

How old were you when you first read this series? Personally I was 12 when I read the Hobbit, and was 15 before I read LOTR.

Click to expand...

I read both LotR and The Hobbit when I was 10 I didn’t understand some parts XD and left it away for a few months before I could make myself read it again.

I was 46 years old

I once started the 50th Anniversary Edition of the Hobbit, when I was in my 30s, but never got past the first chapter

It's a children's story, so somewhat off-putting for many adult readers. But the tone changes, as the story progresses -- especially the last four chapters -- so I recommend giving it another shot.

Hiril Arwen said:

I was 46 years old
I once started the 50th Anniversary Edition of the Hobbit, when I was in my 30s, but never got past the first chapter

Click to expand...

Squint-eyed Southerner said:

It's a children's story, so somewhat off-putting for many adult readers. But the tone changes, as the story progresses -- especially the last four chapters -- so I recommend giving it another shot.

Click to expand...

Well, yes.
But as I have now read John D. Rateliff's "The History of The Hobbit", the 2011 single-volume edition of the 2007 originals, I found a part that should be food for thought.
Very late in the book Rateliff covers what he called "The Fifth Phase", also called "The 1960 Hobbit".
Here, JRRT seems to have attempted what PJ did in his prequel film trilogy, to convert TH into a LoTR "mode" or whatever.
What appears to have brought JRRT's attempts in this direction to a crashing, and terminal, halt, is what Rateliff describes as follows:

"According to Christopher Tolkien, when his father had reached this point [Rivendell] in the recasting he loaned the material to a friend to get an outside opinion on it. We do not know this person's identity, but apparently her response was something along the lines of 'this is wonderful, but it's not The Hobbit'.

"The Hobbit" is a book in it's own right. For far too many decades, it has been put down even by critics sympathetic to JRRT as something like "that children's fairy-tale predecessor" of LoTR. As the first edition of TH, also due to WW II, never reached 20 thousand sold copies (another fact to be found in Rateliff's book), this had at the time of publication of LoTR, some justification.

By the year 2000 (I think stated stated in one of Tom Shippey's books, but I have been unable to locate the exact quote) the LoTR had reached 50 million copies sold worldwide. TH was not far behind, at 40 million ... numbers that have soared since then.

Halasían said:

I think it's time to ask this question again...

How old were you when you were introduced to Middle Earth?

Click to expand...

About 40... via The Hobbit.

Halasían said:

I think it's time to ask this question again...

How old were you when you were introduced to Middle Earth?

Click to expand...

Thirteen. LoTR. My English teacher at school told me to read it as if it was real history.

I was 13 years old, it was the Easter holidays some time in late April. I spend the whole day in the hammock in our garden and only left when the sun started to set and my eyes started to burn.

But to be honest, I didn't really grasp completely what I was reading there, especially when it came to the Silmarillion and the Unfinished Tales, which I read just a few weeks later. When I was around 18 or 19 I reread the books and even though I knew the story, they were like new to me. And again just shortly at 26 I reread them again and for a third time, I was surprised about what I had missed the last two times. I am already excited for, how it will feel in a few years from now, when I introduce myself to Middle-Earth the next time.

And to be honest, I wish I'd read TH first. I read LoTR and then basically went straight to TH and was a bit disappointed at the difference in tone - TH obviously being a much 'lighter' work. It took me quite a few re-reads to begin to fully appreciate the first book.
I think it would have been a much more natural progression from TH to LoTR.

I was 7 years old when I first read The Lord of the Rings, after watching the movie of 'The Fellowship of the Ring'. It was like nothing I'd ever seen or read before, as a small child in a remote town. I think I read the book in a week, because I was so interested in what would happen next. I was most interested in Frodo and Sam's journey, and I sometimes thought the story took too long to get back to them in the later chapters of the book. 😂

My dad saw how much I liked the book, and so he decided to get me The Hobbit. We read it together, one chapter every evening. Being so young, I was more focused on the meaning of the words than how they were put together, so I didn't notice the difference in tone between the two books at all. Just that one story was a lot longer than the other.

I think I discovered the Silmarillion hiding in a bookshelf of ours at around the age of 12. I saw it was by the same author, but I got a bit confused when starting to read, because I didn't have much context for what it was supposed to be. It looked like Greek mythology and the Bible mixed together. I can't remember how far into it I went, but I must have lost interest in favour of the other books I liked reading at the time.
I tried reading it again when I was about 16, and this time it seriously caught my interest for some reason. I read the whole thing, then searched online for more information about the world and characters.

Halasían said:

I think it's time to ask this question again...

How old were you when you were introduced to Middle Earth?

My original post to this is here.

Click to expand...

Nine or ten.

I was born on 11 April 1992, and watched the original Croatian premiere of the Fellowship of the Ring which was on 10 January 2002. Even adding some time, that is nine years and eight to ten months.

And I read the books immediately afterwards.

Eldacar said:

I was 13 years old, it was the Easter holidays some time in late April. I spend the whole day in the hammock in our garden and only left when the sun started to set and my eyes started to burn.

But to be honest, I didn't really grasp completely what I was reading there, especially when it came to the Silmarillion and the Unfinished Tales, which I read just a few weeks later. When I was around 18 or 19 I reread the books and even though I knew the story, they were like new to me. And again just shortly at 26 I reread them again and for a third time, I was surprised about what I had missed the last two times. I am already excited for, how it will feel in a few years from now, when I introduce myself to Middle-Earth the next time.

Click to expand...

"Time changes us."
Each time you read the stories, it was a different "you" reading them. So they were new to that particular "you".
And that is true for all of us when we reread a story, any story, if several years have passed.
And the more years that pass, the more different is that "you" from the earlier one and the newer the book will be to you.
(Until you reach a certain age, *ahem* mine, and then the book will be totally new, because you'll swear you had never read it before. 😬😮😄)