I am a humanities professor at a small private school in the Southeast. My lovely wife and I have four children (all boys!) aged seven and under. All of us are fans of Tolkien. I read The Hobbit for the first time at the age of six, and my oldest son has already read it, too. Every night my kids ask me for a bedtime story from the Silmarillion, and we love watching the Peter Jackson films together.
My on-again, off-again relationship with video gaming also goes back to my childhood, from the day my older brother persuaded my parents to buy an Atari 2600. (Anyone remember Adventure? Or Zork?) There have been several periods of my life where I’ve had to put games aside for various reasons, but I’ve always had a soft spot for them. My first MMORPG experience was around 2005, when my brother persuaded me to join him and his son playing City of Heroes. I had a lot of fun with that, but stopped playing after they moved on to other interests.
I began playing LotRO in June 2007, shortly after the game’s launch, and knew immediately I was in a different league. I was very impressed with the game’s graphics, attention to detail, and (most of all) the developers’ obvious respect for source material. To me, this is LotRO’s greatest strength: no other game can come close to matching the richness of Tolkien’s lore. Time and again I walked into an area and found to my delight not only places and characters from Tolkien’s works, but new faces and locations that were fully consistent with the spirit of Middle Earth. LotRO’s other trump card is the caliber of its community; players are very helpful to each other and also (in general) respectful of Tolkien’s vision. Interacting with them is a completely different experience from what I had when I did a two-week trial of another MMO and encountered what appeared to be 1,000 potty-mouthed twelve-year-old kids trying to impress each other. (I bet you can’t guess what game that was. Go ahead, try!)
When talking to other players in-game, I was surprised to learn how many had either never read anything by Tolkien, or had only read The Hobbit. I knew these folks were missing out on a big part of the richness of Middle Earth, and that they would never fully appreciate LotRO until they were introduced to some of the lore. That’s what inspired me to blog about it.
I have a heavy teaching schedule (twice the load of what many other university professors have) and additional duties as a department chair at my little school, so running my own blog is not really a good option for me. I’m grateful to Merric and Goldenstar for giving me a spot on CStM’s roster so I can get some of this lore into the blogosphere!
Feel free to look me up on the Landroval server. Punggo is a level 65 Warden and a member of the Palantiri kinship. My alts (Elladonn, Monterco, Allori, and Aegithrond) are members of the Blue Eagles, a kin I started with students and alumni of the school where I teach.
See you in the game!
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