I was born in Baltimore, Maryland in the 1990s. Baltimore used to be one of the biggest cities in the United States, but it has faded significantly over the past 200 years and is now one of the deadliest. I didn’t grow up in the city proper, though I visited it frequently, but in the suburbs around it. From an early age I was a kid who was more fond of imaginary worlds than the real world, largely because of various family issues. I discovered the joys of escapism fantasy and science fiction for the first time when I was five years old and in Kindergarten.
I had heard the other kids in my class talk a lot about these movies called Star Wars, but I was somewhat apprehensive about them since my parents were both pacifists (being Quakers). Eventually I asked my mother if I could watch them, and she seemed surprised that I had doubted she would. I watched Episode I: The Phantom Menace first, and I enjoyed it. It was not until I watched the classic trilogy (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi) that I fell in love, though. Those movies fired my imagination.
Another early inspiration were the Harry Potter books. I started reading them when I was six or seven, and while I was initially unimpressed by the first few chapters of Philosopher’s Stone (renamed Sorcerer’s Stone in the United States because the published thought kids wouldn’t want to read a book with “philosopher” in the title), I quickly became engrossed. I followed the series eagerly through 2007, and even convinced my family to go to a midnight release party for the final book since I knew there wouldn’t be any more. While I felt somewhat underwhelmed by the last book compared to the first six, the series left a lasting impression on me and was my first taste of fantasy.
My favourite creative work is, as you’ve probably guessed by the topic of this site, The Lord of the Rings, though that was a relative latecomer. My parents would not let me watch the movies as I wasn’t even into double digits when they were being released, though my father bought me a boxed set of The Hobbit and TLotR in the hopes that I would read it. I wasn’t interested for several months and put it on a shelf to collect dust, but then I saw the Return of the King video game.
It was one of the first video games I’d ever seen (we didn’t have a console until I was 10) and it had a mystique as there was actual fighting in it (my parents being rather squeamish about such things in entertainment. I was quite impressed by it and spent many hours watching other people play the game (and a few trying it myself, though I wasn’t very good). I was more interested in the world of the game, which even then I could tell was rich and detailed. Questions such as “what are Orcs?” intrigued me, and I soon realized that asking other gamers was not going to satisfy me. At that point I remembered the books I had received and took them off the shelf to read.
I devoured all four volumes, taking care to read every word, and realized immediately that they were classics. While my interest in the books has not always been constant (losing my only copy for over a year didn’t help) and I have read other fantasy works such as The Belgariad (which I like less with time) and A Song of Ice and Fire (which I think is the greatest of post-Tolkienian fantasies), The Lord of the Rings has remained my favourite. Over the years I gradually expanded my collection of Tolkien books, buying Unfinished Tales while at the aforementioned Harry Potter release party waiting for the stroke of midnight.
The event that rekindled my interest in Tolkien occurred at a party in the summer of 2008. I was talking with a number of other kids and teenagers there about books and fantasy, and made a passing comment about how there wasn’t character development in The Lord of the Rings. One of the other people there gave an exasperated sigh and simply said “read the books again and read them closer”. I fancied myself something of a Tolkien buff (though in retrospect that was highly inaccurate), and was rather stung. I began re-reading what books I had and purchasing more, particularly from The History of Middle-earth series. I even ventured into the online fandom, which except for a few brief periods in 2007 I had never been a part of.
After participating in earnest on Tolkien forums it became clear to me how little I really knew, and while discussing the books online has helped me learn a lot, I know there is still much more out there. I also realized that there were other people as obsessed as I was, something I had rarely seen from my family and real life friends. In September 2009, after window shopping for a way to upload essays to the Internet, I made a blog at WordPress.com to archive a project about Purism that I’d been sporadically working on for several months. I felt that the site seemed very empty with just that, so I began adding more material to it, and am still working on that when I am not overcome by business or, more significantly, laziness.
