help me catch up with Lord of the Rings lore?

Everyone has their own favourite way to go on this. You must either have a good working knowledge of proper and archaic English, or keep a dictionary handy. There are a lot of word and terms that are rarely used now, but this mode of writing was meant to mimic the old sagas and tales from medieval times and before...Tolkien was a Master philologist, and taught Anglo-Saxon and other things considered 'dead', and liberally doused his own tales with what he loved about all of the old NW European myth/histories...

Lord of the Rings was his finished masterpiece, and it is a long, manytimes dark morality tale with a lot of minutia in the descriptives dept. People tend to tire of the detail work. But think about it, LOTR is what became the epic whispered about in the 60s (quite a while after first being published), and has never been out of the popular mindset since.

The Hobbit was written with Tolkien's own children in mind, and it is a children's adventure tale. It's good, but it's not epic. The films have been made so to keep a continuity with the LOTR films.

If you can manage the read, read LOTR first. You'll see, as with all books-to-movies, much is left out and things not in the books are added. But the Peter Jackson films are absolute masterpieces in atmosphere if nothing else (I am a purist, but love to watch the fillms none-the-less). There was never anything quite like ALL the many groundbreaking things done in these films. Costuming, armour, weaponry, makeup, set design, locations....gawd...the location work alone is breathtaking.

Good luck whichever way you go....and most of all....enjoy!!