After months of obsessing over LoTR lore and reading the wiki and watching videos.. somehow it ends up feeling metaphysically flat. Tolkien even started writing a sequel about the mundane world after the trilogy but stopped because he had basically purged the magic out of his universe at the end and there was nothing else interesting that could occur. I also fundamentally disagree with the idea of things being more powerful and fantastic in the past but being mundane and mechanical in the present, it reflects a worldview distorted by the lense through which a naive individual views time and his own percieved helpless subdued muted place in his own life.