I was introduced to Lord of the Rings by my mother and aunt. The set I read in early middle school was the same set they each read in middle school. I saw the old Hobbit cartoon and didn’t connect with it much. Me and many family members eagerly attended the LotR movie releases though and occasionally stood in line for hours when that was a thing.

My mom was part of that hippie generation that gave LOTR its first taste of success. I read her copies about 1970 or so. That generation of fandom was quite different from what there is today. Now we’ve got volume after volume of additional information and stories and wonderfulness, but back then there was LOTR, The Hobbit, and some scholarly works. We couldn’t even be baffled by the Silmarilion yet!

My mother read them to my brother and I when I was around 6. The Christmas after I was given a beautiful illustrated copy of the lord of the rings.

We’d usually gather in the living room and watch movies together as a family, and Lord of the Rings trilogy quickly became a fan favourite. (still rewatching it annually!)

After that I played Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Battle For Middle Earth 2, although I’m not sure which one I played first.

We also had the Lord of the Rings animated cartoon on a CD, which was unfinished IIRC.

Only years later have I finally read the Hobbit (found a great annotated version in the library), but I’ve yet to read the LOTR.

Me and my mom read the hobbit when I was younger. My mom was always the smart one, and we had our little moments. The movies came out when I was fairly young, 10 maybe. I vividly remember when I first saw it, with a friend who I’ve since grown apart from.

I tried to get super into the books, even the silmarillion and I doubt I was really following back then, and I guess i just kept trying, cause now I love it, and have re read the books a few times now, and they are really very good, along with all the world building stuff.

I have vague, terrified memories of watching the Rankin/Bass *Hobbit *movie in first grade back in…uh…1986, but it obviously didn’t make me into the fan I’ve become. I hardly remember anything about it other than Bilbo climbing the tallest tree in Mirkwood and the spiders.

My next introduction to Tolkien went much better when our 7th grade class got assigned to read The Hobbit for language arts. From the first look at the map in the front of the book I was fascinated. I’d just started getting into (A)D&D and fantasy in general, and finding the wellspring from which much of that material came from was amazing. To this day, I think that The Hobbit is my favorite Tolkien book. I’ve read most everything Middle-Earth related outside of the HoME series, but the tone and the nostalgia of The Hobbit makes it special.

My mom gave me the Hobbit book when I was in early elementary school, and I loved it.

A few years later, the Lord of the Rings movies came out, though I was still too young to see them. Some of my classmates did though, but seeing them mostly imitating the “cool” characters fighting put me off of what I perceived was a generic Hollywood rip-off of the Hobbit (I knew there was a ring that makes people invisible, along with hobbits and elves, so understood that it was set in the same universe).

My godmother gifted me the first book around that time, and I realized that it was a real book by the same author. Hoping for a second Hobbit, I tried to read it but got stuck in the first twenty pages where Tolkien was describing the different types of hobbits, and gave up on it.

A few years later, the first movie was shown on TV. I didn’t have high expectations of what I still thought would be a shallow Hollywood adaptation of Tolkien’s world, but was (in hindsight predictably) blown away. I loved everything about it, enough to motivate me to give the books another try, and started looking for more information online about that world. The second movie came out on TV a little later, and I didn’t want to wait for the third one so I spent some of my precious allowance on the DVD collection and finally watched the whole trilogy.

Looking back, I don’t mind missing out on the movies the first time around; if anything, the absence of hype made it feel more personal (nevermind the slight mocking of classmates when I’d be googling “LotR” in computer class, three years after the movies came out and when the rest of my classmates were mostly over them).

And I am probably in a very small minority to have low expectations before watching the movie. The contrasting amazement and marvel I felt is something I still cherish to this day.

For me, it was the Return of the King game for PS2.

I was loaned a copy of the Hobbit by a classmate. Within a few days I’d finished it & found LOTR in the library. Those books absolutely changed my approach to reading as I could not put them down. I still have copies of the Silmarillion, Tales of Middle Earth, The Hobbit & LOTR. I’d later watch the movies but they didn’t do much for me even if they were good. I feel like the book is a much more immersive, complete experience IMO.