That's certainly possible. Anything can distract a reader, though movie adaptations of the same book are, by dint both of being adaptations of the same book and by dint of being movies (a very powerful story-telling medium) are the most effective of doing so.
I expect there are, however, also cases where this person would never have liked Tolkien anyway, and would never have read him if not fooled into thinking that he's anything at all like these other authors. This is not new: Tolkien has been wrongfully assimilated into Sword & Sorcery for decades now. L. Sprague de Camp wrote an essay in the 70s calling for stories of mighty-thewed warriors who didn't snivel over their internal neuroses, like the Conan stories. But he included LOTR as an example. Conan would have considered even Aragorn a rather sniveling fellow, and wouldn't have grasped the idea of Frodo as a hero at all. [I'm quoting from an in-press but yet-unpublished article of my own here]
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Date: 2013-12-17 05:04 pm (UTC)I expect there are, however, also cases where this person would never have liked Tolkien anyway, and would never have read him if not fooled into thinking that he's anything at all like these other authors. This is not new: Tolkien has been wrongfully assimilated into Sword & Sorcery for decades now. L. Sprague de Camp wrote an essay in the 70s calling for stories of mighty-thewed warriors who didn't snivel over their internal neuroses, like the Conan stories. But he included LOTR as an example. Conan would have considered even Aragorn a rather sniveling fellow, and wouldn't have grasped the idea of Frodo as a hero at all. [I'm quoting from an in-press but yet-unpublished article of my own here]