For this week’s episode of the Tolkien Experience Podcast, I am very excited to share our interview with the creator of Diverse Tolkien!

While she does not want me to use her name, the creator of Diverse Tolkien can be found on Twitter and Tumblr where she focuses on discussing anti-blackness in Tolkien’s work and in the fan community. She wanted me to let you know about her exciting event: Diverse Tolkien Week! This event will be on Twitter and Tumblr during the last week of February. Please listen to the episode to find out more and join in the event later this month!

There are so many books that propose to be authoritative and essential to studying Tolkien and/​or Middle-earth that I thought it might be helpful for me to put together a list of recommended books. This list is focused specifically on reference books: encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases, guides, companions, etc.I have already addressed biographies in a separate post.

In a way, this will help readers interested in digging deeper to avoid texts that may have inaccuracies or fabrications.

I have split my list into books that I recommend and books that I do not recommend. There are, of course, many more reference works that I have not commented on. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. I welcome feedback and additions in the comments! …

My father read The Lord of the Rings aloud to me when I was probably about six, but I was much too young to truly grasp the story – that being said, I was entranced by the map of Middle-earth in the edition my family owned, and I would draw characters and scenes from the story on the book’s few blank pages. It’s safe to say Tolkien inspired my passion for art as well as for writing.…

My parents had a copy of The Hobbit sitting on a bookshelf, and a thought I’d give it a try. Over 40 years later, I’m still obsessed. I love Tolkien’s world-building. You really get a sense of each story taking place in a world that’s much larger than the individual story. I’ll also take the opportunity to plug my favorite somewhat obscure Tolkien story – ​“Athrabeth Finrod Ah Andreth,” from Morgoth’s Ring. …

We have a fantastic guest to start off our second season of the Tolkien Experience Podcast: Marcel Aubron-Bülles!

Marcel, also known as The Tolkienist, is very involved in Tolkien fandom. Marcel is best know for his work as the founder of the German Tolkien Society. He is also an independent Tolkien scholar, and a very active member of the Tolkien Society and Tolkien Tribe. He has recently started a Patreon where you can keep up with his travels and Tolkien news.

… On the J.R.R. Tolkien front, a few months ago I was by chance connected with the nephew of a man who photographed Tolkien late in life.…

Also on the Tolkien front, Mary Fairburn (b. 1933), the artist who submitted her drawings to Tolkien in 1968 – drawings approved by Tolkien, and finally published in the 2015 Tolkien Calendar, has published her autobiography, Borne on the Wind: Memoirs of an Artist (2020). Details and some interesting photographs appear at the publisher’s website here, along with contact details for ordering copies.…

The Digital Tolkien Project now has a paragraph-based citation system for The Hobbit derived directly from the marked-up version of the text and checked against previous work by others.

Back in 2018, I generated an initial paragraph-based citation system for The Hobbit based on my initial markup of the text in discussion with Paul O’Rear. At the time, I did an initial comparison with L. F. S. Alden’s Paragraph Index to The Hobbit but in the last month, I’ve been working with Ugo Truffelli to align my citation system with his own work and we’ve now reached a consensus. In this post, I’ll go through the initial discrepencies between Alden, Tuffelli and myself and discuss how Ugo and I resolved them (sometimes by me changing the XML markup).…

My dad read The Hobbit aloud to my sister and I when we were very little – I think I was about 4 years old. It is one of my favorite memories, sitting on either side of him on the couch. We also watched the animated Rankin-Bass films when we were young and they were a major part of my childhood.…

I was going through a bad break-up when I was around 16 and my father bought me the Lord of the Rings books to have something to occupy my mind with. I’m so glad I have editions with pre-movie covers! …

I first became aware at Primary school at the age of 9 or 10 when we were set to write an essay on a book we were reading. Someone in class wrote about The Two Towers. I had never heard of it so he described it and recommended The Hobbit. I found a second hand copy at a jumble sale and that was me hooked. Later another friend lent me The Lord of the Rings. I still remember the edition, hardback with the dust jacket with Pauline Baynes’s illustrations. Those were good times to discover Tolkien as soon after came the Ralph Bakshi film and the BBC Radio 4 adaptation.…

I’d heard on and off about The Hobbit and Bilbo Baggins so that the names were vaguely familiar to me as a child and teenager, but my first real introduction was the trailer to the 2001 adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” I watched the trailer over and over because it looked so good! I ended up seeing the first movie in theaters seven times. From there, I read the LotR trilogy for the first time and started obsessing over Middle-earth.…

When the movies came out, I was about 17 years old, and a school friend of mine told me about Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. I first bought the CD with Howard Shore’s music for the The Fellowship of the Ring, then I watched the movies, and finally I read the books. The experience remained with me but for a long time I did not delve deeper. Until a couple of years ago when I started to read more and more of Tolkien’s works as well as about Tolkien’s works. I am now building my own little collection of Tolkien books.…