Middle-Earth games: Where should I start?

[Ethelred the Almost Ready]

Unless you are firmly set on gaming with 28mm minis, GW actually made a Warmaster version of Battle of the Five Armies (10mm), for which it would be easy to adapt the Mark Copplestone range mentioned earlier.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/16538/battle-five-armies

Smaller scale, and rules much better suited for really large battles; in the SBG each warrior fights, in the Warmaster version units fight.

I have (to my knowledge) all the different Warmaster rulesets, and thus access to a large number of different unit profiles, and have been toying with the idea of a War of the Ring project, but that being said, I'm a sucker for the Perrys' movie adaption minis of which I have a HUGE collection, so it is probably never going to happen.. 

I found this site a while ago.  It is fan-based Warmaster updated : http://warmaster-cz.blogspot.com/