Fascinating! It never would have occurred to me that the sentence was worded ambiguously until you pointed it out, but your interpretation is 100% valid. English is a strange language.

Yeah, I considered including at least the Simarillion in the calculations, but the sales numbers for LoTR and the Hobbit are so staggeringly large that including his other works seemed pointless.

You raise a very good point about holding him responsible for all the works he inspired through. He invented a whole new sub-genre of fantasy, leading to hundreds of millions (if not billions) more books being printed.

And think of the movies! I wonder how many trees died to print scripts and build sets for 6 movies and a TV series

One could argue that Tolkien is an enemy to the trees. [Warning unverified sources and very rough maths lie below]

• The LOTR Trilogy has sold 150 million copies, and the Hobbit has sold 142 million source
• Each LOTR book has a (very rough) average of 430 pages, while the Hobbit has ~360. This totals to 115,620,000,000 pages printed
• The average tree creates ~20,000 sheets of paper source

This means Tolkien is responsible for the deaths of at least 5,781,000 trees. The Ents would not be happy

100% agree. There is tons of delicious vegetarian/vegan food, but vegetarian/vegan substitutions of traditionally meat based dishes range from terrible to just okay.

Carb replacement dishes have the same problem. Spaghetti Squash is delicious when cooked as a vegetable, but throwing Ragu on it and pretending it is pasta is just sad.

Yeah, that seems like a useless benchmark for judging a search engine

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