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Was unaware of this. Can’t wait to play this with my kids this weekend. We recently finished The Hobbit and have been reading Choose Your Own Adventure books. They’ll love this.

I was never able to read all the way through the books myself; they were much too dry for my taste. I did quite enjoy The Hobbit though, and I think the LotR movies are fantastic. It's an excellent cinematic universe, IMO. There is so much there to build a story upon.

I would ordinarily say I bought a copy of The Hobbit, but I guess if I said "Hey I bought The Hobbit the other day", people would assume I meant the book.

I'd normally say "I bought a copy of ISO 8601". In this case I think the author thought it was a little funny to say "I bought iso 8601".

I've read many many books that have changed my life.

That's probably one reason why I read.

To say that Pound's translation of the Analects was more profoundly important than the Tao and Faulkner's The Town and Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and The Hobbit from my youth and The Three Little Pigs read nearly nightly to a child doesn't make sense.

Sometimes I walk through Castaneda's world.

Sometimes Knuth's.

Other's I am in my head with Vonnegut.

Profoundness is out in the world.

And many books point to it.

I was raised liberal Catholic by an atheist father and an eclectic hippie New-Age-Catholic-Hindu-dowsing-crystals-homeopathy-and-runic[0]-divination mother, for the purposes of getting into a good school.

While it is fair to say that one specific fundamentalist young-Earth creationist Baptist certainly turned me from “it isn’t true but it doesn’t matter” to “it is actively harmful for people to believe this”, I should also say that the liberal version of Catholicism at my school — liberal enough to not explicitly condemn abortion or homosexuality, even though this was the U.K. in the 1990s and Section 28 still in force — had terrible sex education which completely ignored the existence of e.g. chlamydia, and I do think that was due to the religion given how quickly I learned about it the moment I moved to the next step in my education.

The open-mindedness may have been good for me as a teenager going through a goth-paganism phase, but it also meant she gave my dad homeopathic remedies when he got bowel cancer, and she got Alzheimer’s 15 years younger than her mother “despite” her use of Bach flower remedies for memory.

[0] naturally this meant I learned to read the outer border of the Allen & Unwin edition of The Hobbit, and the text in the hand drawn maps inside: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/...

In Tolkien's case, that's not just obscure stuff. The Silmarillion is widely considered "canonical", but it was published after his death, with countless editorial choices by his son. In most cases, later writings explicitly contradict the ones Christopher chose.

He chose them because they were the ones most compatible with the other published works, because his father could never revise them. (Unlike The Hobbit, which as revised to make it more compatible with upcoming The Lord of the Rings.)

He was specifically chosen for the job by his father, who may not have agreed with the choices but was unequivocal that Christopher was the one to make them. Christopher himself has said that he'd change some decisions if he were to make them again, but that's true for any author.

To me, I'd just as soon The Silmarillion bear Chrisopher's name. Not as a matter of honor, but as a matter of clarity to fans who want to know what's "really" Tolkien.

A warning before filling your kids with anticipation: I loved The Hobbit and Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid but I remember being very disappointed with this game - maybe it demanded more commitment but I gave up on it after a few days. I found it inscrutable at the time - characters coming and going at random, fighting with the parser trying to express my intentions, unclear progression, not enough humor, etc.

I reckon later graphical adventures - the Lucasarts ones for example, would provide a better shared experience. Can’t wait to try Monkey Island with mine when old enough.

I think the author is also severely underestimating how early Tolkien starting working on his maps. The Hobbit (published in 1937) already came with a somewhat fleshed out map of the Misty Mountains and surroundings, and it is fair to assume that from this the remainder of Middle-Earth was fleshed out. (I cannot quickly find somewhere when he first drew a complete map of Middle-Earth, but Wikipedia notes that "The paper became soft, torn and yellowed through intensive use, and a fold down the centre had to be mended using parcel tape" [1]. So he probably knew what Middle-Earth looked like for quite some time, maybe even late 1930s?

To presume that Tolkien would have had an understanding of the then state-of-the-art theories around continental drift is a bit hopeful. In fact, plate tectonics did come to be accepted until the 50s/60s, so Tolkien could barely have known of the theory when writing LOTR and especially not when drawing the initial map.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_maps#The_Lord_of_t...

I don't have a better link than yours, but books I own talk about maps of the wider Middle Earth (first age) being developed in the 1920s and 30s (e.g. a recognizable Silmarillion Map from the 1930s).

The mapping in The Hobbit was finalised in 1936 and published in 1937, and was started in the late 1920s. Detailed maps of Middle Earth for TLOTR were produced in the 1940s, e.g. a contour map of Minas Morgul from 1944, although I can't find a date for the first rough maps.

To my mind there is a bit of a tension between Tolkien's "I started with a map..." comment and the fact that the story took a while to settle [0] down on the core theme of the One Ring and the need for a quest through Middle Earth (hence the map) that would destroy it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings#Writing