Well it's not really intended to be a readable story, more an exercise in constructing a linguistic and literary tradition or something. Tolkien adapted his world quite a lot when he decided to set actual books in it to make it actually readable and interesting to an audience, first the Hobbit (which he only loosely associated with his legendarium at first) and then Lord of the Rings (in which he brought the two much closer together).
I guess you could say something similar of the Bible, it's more a historical/legal/religious document than a story.
The Bible, incidentally, is absolutely unreadable. The first 5 pages of Genesis are a story and the rest is just a train wreck, narratively speaking.
When you skipped to the end did you realise that nothing new happened between page 100 and page 1,000? Because my god did that crap drag on, rehashing points she'd made at the start over and over. But then it's not so much a story as a lecture.