Just finished reading the whole LOTR series to my daughter night after night. It is very long winded, yes. But she actually had little problem with it, and she actually preferred the portions that many consider long winded and tangential (Bombadil and Scouring of the Shire for example) But he was trying to do something with the English language that others haven't got, trying to bring back an Anglo-Saxon poetics to it. It is quite lovely when read aloud, tho the landscape descriptions... oh my long winded.

But yeah, the good vs evil stuff is pretty ham-fisted and always was. And there's some pretty racist stuff in there.