…. it’s amazing. The author, Tolkien, was an Oxford don, deeply serious. He was a scholar of languages, specifically those of early Northern Europe. He knew the myths and legends and sagas backward and forward and translated them into modern English.
He was already at work on his creation of languages when he joined the British military in WWI, along with a number of his friends. I think he was the only one who made it back from the gas and the trenches — maybe there was one other.
It was there in that hell that he started creating another world. He spent the rest of his long life writing about Middle Earth — when he could spare the time from research, teaching, and the myriad duties of a university professor. His published works were largely academic — the translations of Beowulf, Chaucer, the Eddas, and so on — but he kept creating Middle Earth. The enormous success of The Hobbit and LOTR surprised him, I think.
I think the battered paperback set I read in the summer of 1965 was the unauthorized first American publication. I had quite a background in F&SF by that time, since it had always been in the house before I could even read. From sheer experience I intuited good writing from bad, and while this didn’t hit me as a blinding revelation the way it did others, when I read the last page I proceeded to read all the appendices because I could not let it go. I have read it a number of times since then — and in what I think of as a peak moment of my motherhood, I read all of it aloud to my 11 y.o. son in lieu of the books reports he wasn’t writing, but could give orally.
In college I met people who were trying to learn Elvish, which I thought was weird. In my family we read F&SF avidly, but the opinion from Mom was that it was escapism and not literature. As it happens, she was wrong.
The further along in my own education I got, the more I realized the depth of knowledge certain authors brought to their fictional worlds. But not every genre or sub-genre fits every reader. I had a fascinating conversation with a cousin and his wife in 2002. He knows about a dozen languages fluently. She is Chinese and a well-known author in China. (A whole bunch of her books are by now translated into English) In any case, LOTR was out in film — and the conversation turned on the fact that neither of them understood why the heck it was so popular — what did it mean, what in our culture made it so gripping? I felt I didn’t explain it well — or couldn’t get it across the barrier, so I never really stopped thinking about that conversation.
So — there it is. All I can tell you is there are reasons — and Western/European mythology has a different point of view from Asian/Chinese mythology. My cousin is as American as I am, but his interests and the course of his life are not as mine. His wife is an amazing woman, but I find her novels tough going — no mythology involved. So 
Sorry if this is TLDR — I got interrupted several times, as often happens.
All the best in whatever it is you like to read — not everyone is keen on Elves and Wizards. 
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