It was 10:30 PM on Wednesday December 17, 2003, my mother’s birthday; I was not at home or in bed, or thinking about what school was going to be like the next day after getting home at 2:30 in the morning. Instead, I was waiting in line for the culminating edition of the Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It was the last part of the three-part epic, The Return of the King. I had been waiting for it for two years. I had my first taste of Tolkien two years previously after the first of the movies had been released.
The movie was captivating. As soon as I saw the first one, I wanted to know more. It was an unrelenting quest for knowledge about this fictitious world. The most amazing thing was that no matter how deep I dug into Middle-earth there was always farther to go. There was another world, entirely alien to everything I had ever known, but it existed only on paper. The fact that I knew nothing about this fictitious world was irrelevant, I still craved more information about its history and its inhabitants which was baffling to me. It drove me to want to learn more. It also piqued my interest in its creator, a British philologist and English professor named J. R. R. Tolkien. In this website, I examine the life of this man as well as some of the beliefs that influenced his writing.
