I suppose it’s a testament to Tolkien’s economy of language that the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy – interminable preamble and endless appendices and all – has a smaller total page count than the individual books of your average modern doorstopper fantasy series, yet manages to pack in such a high density of worldbuilding detail that reading it feels like it takes about a thousand years.
(For those expressing incredulity at the idea of Tolkien being an economical storyteller, one must understand that the ability to communicate a great deal of information very efficiently is a totally separate skill from the ability to get to the damn point.)
The day I found out the Twilight series has a higher word count (587,246
words across four books) than LotR (481,103 words across three books) was a dark day.