Personally, I was more taken with the first film, probably for the obvious structural advantages of the freshness of beginnings, the charm of the Shire, the emotion of the challenge before the Fellowship; but the second film was excellent and satisfying in its own right, with more humor and the unmitigated thrill of epic battle.

The two films forced me to return to the source for the first time in over 20 years, and since I am more interested in what happens next than in making slavish book-to-film comparisons, I went right to the final book in the trilogy, The Return of the King. I will review the book yet as I am in the middle of it, but here are a few thoughts:

I had forgotten how archaic the language was - people not only speak in the words and syntax of an older English, but they speak with an earnestness and utter absence of irony that is startling in 2003. Expressions of feeling are not couched one iota in the self-conscious, winking attenuations of our age, but ring out with declarations punctuated with unabashed exclamation marks!! It is as if modernism, and especailly post-moderism never existed.

For this reason, accusations that Rowling's Harry Potter series is unduly derivative of Tolkien strike me as absurd: other than surface similarities regarding wizards, magic, and the clash of good and evil, the tone is completely different, with Potter being in and of the here and now, with attendant irony, jokeyness, and self-awareness.

The Potter language is contemporary, the stories are about children, not adults, and are microcosmic, not the grand panorama of Tolkien. Rowling is no more ripping off Tolkien than Tolkien ripped off the accumulated mythic lore of mankind: similar themes keep coming up because similar themes have ALWAYS come up.

Back to the matter of cultural phenomena as mentioned in the referenced Variety article, another indication of the Ring's prominence in the collective cultural psyche is the number of times it has come up in these very pages. See discussions of the films and the books here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.