My .htaccess file is giving me a headache

Hello lads, my .htaccess file is giving me a headache and I need your help to fix it (no, an aspirin won't do ). I'm working on a multilingual website on an Apache 1.3.34 server and I would like all visitors to be sent to the English homepage /en/index.htm, including the following:

1. A permanent redirect from the non-www version to the www-version of the domain;
2. A permanent redirect from the root directory to /en/index.htm
3. A rule so that /en/index.htm appears as /en/

After fiddling around for a while I managed to get the first 301 redirect working (see the code below), but not the other two. Can anyone help me out, please?

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.tld [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.tld/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

Code (markup):

 

After a long internet search and a few hours of more fiddling with my .htaccess I was able to find the correct pieces of coding that I need thanks to DP-member Stephen D. Sandecki (a.k.a. ssandecki) and his great practical .htaccess redirect examples. I solved the second and third issues by adding the following piece of coding to my .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*[COLOR="Green"]index.htm[/COLOR]\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^[COLOR="Green"]index.htm[/COLOR] en/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*[COLOR="Green"]index.htm[/COLOR]\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^en/[COLOR="Green"]index.htm[/COLOR] en/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

Code (markup):

The first two lines permanently redirect every request of the index.htm file in the root directory to the English base directory en/, while the second two lines permanently redirect every request of the index.htm file in the English folder to the English base directory en/.
While I was on it, I discovered that these lines of coding also work to permanently redirect wrong incoming requests of the non-existent index.html files to the base directories in their respective folder. For instance:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*[COLOR="Red"]index.html[/COLOR]\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^en/[COLOR="Red"]index.html[/COLOR] en/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

Code (markup):

And the headache has gone...