[Child of the 7th Age]

First, thanks to everyone who has posted on this thread so far. Your ideas and stories are interesting.

Burrahobbit -- Thanks for the post. I especially appreciate your perspective because you can look at things from a much longer view than many of us. One of the things that has interested me in this thread is the fact that so many of us who joined after the movie, and who do "serious" posts (whatever that is!), had actually been Tolkien fans for quite a while. It just took the movie to relight the fire and stumble around and find this place on the internet, so in that sense I am grateful for PJ. After ranting and raving against him for a while, I've come to realize that he did a great "fanfiction", a personal statement about how he saw the book, but not the book itself.

From looking at the earliest posts, I got the feeling that another thing that has been lost is the sense of intimacy. Because the site was smaller and it tended to attract the "truly dedicated" back then, I think there would have been more closeness. I also got the feeling from looking at the earlier posts that the board was a bit more "male" and just a tad older then (but not too much so) and a little more oriented to the history of Middle-earth rather than the LotR itself. But my assessment could be wrong as this was just feelings that came from sifting through old friends.

Personally, that is the main change that the board has meant for me. It's gotten me into HoMe and the Legendarium as a whole rather than focusing more narrowly on Hobbit and LotR. I've always read tons of Tolkien criticism (I have quite a collection!) so that really hasn't changed.

Helen - That is an awesome statement. This morning I posted on another thread, about rereading Tolkien and tried to explain some of those more personal things. You might want to look at that if you haven't. It's also an interesting thread.

sharon, the 7th age hobbit