Three thousand years after the defeat of the Dark Lord Sauron before the slopes of Mount Doom, a magic ring falls into the care of Frodo Baggins, a young hobbit from the Shire. Old English and its offspring Middle English owed their origins to various Nordic tongues (Old Norse, Old Icelandic) and eventually, the invading Norsemen brought their culture and religion and especially their languate ultimately fusing all of these into what became the Modern English that I am writing in now.

To create a fantasy world is one thing, but to breathe life into ages of that world, to keep all the pieces together with such magnificent detail and rigour, to create character after believable character and make us care about most of them, even poor Smeagol/Gollum, that is a literary labour of Hercules. I love it because of its place in my personal mythology, its genuine originality, its creativity, its power, but I love it with my mind open to its flaws, and I refuse to make excuses for Tolkien or his work. He has numerous briefly-mentioned side characters and events because organic texts like the epics, which were formed slowly, over time and compiled from many sources often contained such digressions. My family wanted me to read in English, and my tiny rebellion in the form of sticking to Hebrew meant that I limited speaking English as much as possible and avoided reading in English even more.As with so many of my pieces you don’t get to see the characters, instead it is these objects and their positioning as well as other subtle detailing that creates an open-ended image that is designed to be interpreted however you see it playing out in your head, you pick up the pieces and run with it! It was frustration, it was pressure, it was so important in the mythos of the family, so inescapable, and I just… couldn’t.

The Atlas of Middle-Earth has been my favorite supplemental work for longer than some of you have been alive! Just take the mentioned Silmarillion, the immense details of the world, all the links to the cultural heritage, and the sheer scale and size, and, on top of that, close to everyone agrees that it´s a timeless, genre founding, ingenious masterpiece that will stand the test of not just time, but eternity. I have had tons of delightful experiences while venturing into magnificent worlds of fantasy, in Westeros and Narnia and so many others. E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, it is clear that, long before Tolkien, fantasy was already a complex, well-established, and even a respected literary genre. Perhaps in that sense, Galadriel does remain a heroic figure, if more passive than Eowyn, she retains her total independence and a modicum of power, being one of the last two Ring holders with Gandalf.I think this is unfair to the book, which, I am prepared to argue, is a whole lot better than it's generally made out to be; I don't think its huge success is just evidence that people have no taste. Even faced with these ideas supported by convincing arguments, however, many fans either strive for ignorance or attack the messenger. Nature in LOTR is a living, breathing thing and critical to the success of the mission: without the Ents, the Battle of Isengard would certainly have not been such a definitive defeat for Sarumon (another reason why he attacked not only Hobbits but trees as well in his Scouring of the Shire). The popularity of Tolkien’s work made it acceptable for other authors to do the same thing, to the point that whenever I hear a book lauded for the ‘depth of its world building’, I expect to find a mess of obsessive detailing, of piling on so many inconsequential facts and figures that the characters and stories get buried under the scree, as if the author secretly hopes that by spending most of the chapter describing the hero’s cuirass, we'll forget that he’s a bland archetype who only succeeds through happy coincidence and deus ex machina against an enemy with no internal structure or motivation.