Read Adam Roberts on Tolkien, LOTR, and curiositas. Including this little kicker:

This line of thought, indeed, leads me to wonder about the ways we fans have, in effect, failed Tolkien’s test. Temptation exists in the world for us to measure our powers of resistance against. Boromir, for example, is led astray by his pride and fails the test the ring represents. But the novel itself embodies a manifest temptation to a particular sort of fan: it gives us glimpses, in song and allusion, to a deep past lying behind the story’s now. It teases us with bits and pieces in imaginary languages. We could, if we chose, simply take those things as they are offered, and enjoy the affect (let’s say: awe, wonder, whatever the opposite of vertigo is) they generate in us. But we don’t. We are overwhelmed by our curiosity, and become positively Sarumanic in our eagerness to winkle out all the myriad trivial details of that past, constructing for ourselves elaborate textual machines to that effect.