Tonyblack said:
I could have happily throttled Tom Bombadil.
Tom Bombadil is great, so there
I agree LOTR is not a character driven story although both Frodo and Sam have some moments of interesting character development, but the creation of middle earth as a complete world that you can visualise is brilliant.
I would also suggest that most of Pterry's characters are basically stock characters with very little development (exceptions probably Vimes and Tiffany)