Beorn is definitely a top contender for me as well for much the same reasons I listed for Tom; I love that we don't really know too much about Beorn and that although he helps the heroes on two occasions his motivations for doing so are his own.

Given his fate I think Huor would be a little hurt about being compared to an arrow

I just had to explain to my wife why this was funny and she just rolled her eyes and called me a nerd.

I'm not sure if this really answers the question, but I might be tempted to say Sauron: not as a character in the usual sense - i.e. a fictional persona whose psychology we find interesting or that comes alive as a personality we enjoy hearing about or spending time with as a reader - but as an important, perhaps the most important in some respects element or thread in the marvellous tapestry Tolkien wove for us (the entire work was named after him, after all).

Sauron not only drives the whole plot, but also is the most important single factor behind the atmosphere of dread and menace that pervades LotR - you could make a case for it as one of the great horror books of all time, as well as fantasy - and is of course the main fictional (as opposed to mythological) model for and direct progenitor of the whole "Dark Lord" trope that's played so large a part in superhero comics and fantasy fiction ever since that it's become a cliché.

Of course Tolkien was creating a fictional mythology of his own and Sauron and Melkor/Morgoth were themselves directly derived from Milton's Satan, and thus indirectly from the even more primaeval figures that feature in pretty much every mythology we know about (there's a great book about this called The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth, by Neil Forsyth, highly recommended for anyone interested in the subject).

But as a fictional creation - and therefore as a character in the broadest sense - I think Sauron was quite an inspired and original idea: there's nothing like him in Wagner's Ring, that I recall, or in William Morris's fantasy novels (or, I think, in Lord Dunsany's stories, though I'm less sure in this case, having read only one collection so far).

In terms of what we usually think of when we use the word - a personality we like or at least find fascinating in some way - I'd probably go with Gandalf, but in the wider sense of the figure that made the strongest impression on me and that I thnk is most important, yeah, the more I think about it I'd have to say Sauron.

I wonder why they can't show the first age?

I need that firepit in my life stat!

On another note I recently picked up a copy of the Children of Hurin for a buck at a library book sale...and I just can't get into it. I picked it up and devoured it when it first came out but now it just feels like a chore. I had been thinking about re-reading the Similarillion again, but I'm thinking that if I'm having trouble wading through Hurin that I'd find revisiting the larger version an even more herculean task which was far from the case in the days of my youth.

Has anyone else here had a similar issue in revisiting these works?

I've always found The Silmarillion to be pretty impenetrable. I've tried unsecessfully to read it four times so far. I fully intend to get through it one of these days, but yeah...it hasn't happened so far.

I've read and re-read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings many times, and always enjoyed them whether I was 14 or 45. But with the exception of The Silmarillion, I've never tried any of the other posthumously released collections.