[Child of the 7th Age]

Son of Numenor,

Actually, I am sympathetic to what you are saying about PJ. The basic problem is that whoever compiled this list gave us no idea of the criteria they used to make their choices. Even if we accept the fact that any individual is bound to have biases, as well as strengths and weaknesses in their knowledge, we would still need to be apprised of the guidelines used in selecting the names.

Ideally, as you suggest, there would be a list that focused on those individuals who directly influenced Tolkien’s life and writings in both a personal and academic sense. Tolkien may have been “hard to influence”, but I am sure that even he would acknowledge a debt of gratitude to many. This would include CT and other family members, CS Lewis and the rest of the Inklings, members of the TCBS, publishers, and perhaps those illustrators and musicians who worked intimately with Tolkien (Swann and Baynes, for example).

You might have a separate list for those who have helped us better understand the man and his writings: scholars, artists and musicians who interpreted the writings through their work, and even, conceivably, a filmmaker or two. And some of these could come along many years after the author’s death. I don’t think Tolkien would have disapproved of such recognition, since he himself expressed a desire at one point that those skilled with art, music and drama would help “fill-in” the outline of Middle-earth that he had proposed.

Of course, there would be individual judgment involved in all this: whose work merited inclusion and whose did not. On this ground, I would be more prone to put PJ and Howard Shore in this secondary list, for example, rather than Bakshi or Rankin/Bass. (And I am not one who “hated” these other movies.)

There are other names I personally would not include: J.K. Rowling, Gary Gygax, Robert Plant, or Saul Zaentz, for example. Rowling and Gygax may have generated interest in fantasy, but I don’t feel that recognition of Tolkien's uniqueness was in any way dependent on their efforts. Similarly, I don't see things like licensing agreements (Zaentz) or occasional references slipped into a few popular songs (Plant) as anything more than a curiosity.