[matty22]

I think two key points as to your question of _why_ he wrote it like that. First, it is not a novel that he planned out and then sat down and wrote. It's an amalgamation of disparate stories that Christopher cobbled together into a single book because that was the only way they could sell it to the publishers. It's also the quasi-religious tome of the Tolkien world, so rather than comparing the readability to a Stephen King novel, compare it to something like the Bible or the Torah.

All that said, it took me several reads before I felt like I really 'got' it. The hardest part for me was grasping the long timelines since most of it is a story of the elves and they are immortal. You might be following the same character arc for thousands of years. All that struggle was worth it though, because when you reread LOTR _after_ reading The Silmarillion, you pick out things in LOTR that you didn't even know were there before.