TOLKIEN: The man had a lot of time on his hands
Recently, I've been procrastinating by playing Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. If you can't guess by the title, that's a Lord of the Rings game. It's getting old now, in video game years, and even its sequel came out way back in 2017, but it's made me want to ramble about the Lord of the Rings for a little while.
I've written a fair number of stories, and I'm pretty familiar with world building. I've even unexpectedly become Dungeon Master for my D&D group. (I know, there's really no more obvious way to say I'm a massive nerd. Geek? Both? Who knows.) But anyway, all this to say that J.R.R. Tolkien was a FREAKING GENIUS.
World building is hard. Especially making it believable--interactions between different races (if you have more than one), political conflict, making human cities different from elf cities . . .
Everyone is familiar with the elves, dwarfs, humans, and orcs. Prior to Tolkien, though, elves weren't ageless, beautiful, sophisticated creatures; they were a lot more like Santa's elves, or those ones that made shoes for that cobbler. These days you can't do high fantasy without stumbling over Tolkienesque elves and dwarfs.
It's a tragedy that this is the limit of most people's knowledge. The fact that this is only the start is the reason I'm so impressed by Tolkien's world building. Consider this list:
An extensive language, complete with multiple dialects and its own script (more than one, actually, but I think his Elvish had the largest dictionary.)
A very elaborate map containing mountains, grasslands, and forests, and housing at least seven different reasonably intelligent species (humans, hobbits, elves, dwarfs, orcs, ents, and trolls)
The Silmarillion, which is sort of a history book crossed with a religious text.
I could talk for so much longer about the Silmarillion and this world in general. Did you know that Gandalf, Saruman, and Radagast (the wizards) are super not human? They're technically Istari, which, along with the Balrogs, are Maiar spirits. The Balrogs were seduced by Morgoth (also known as Melkor), the first dark lord and the same one that Sauron served.
I would also like to add that Tom Bombadil is the best, because he's super mysterious and possibly one of the most powerful beings in Middle Earth. Gandalf mentioned once that he'd probably misplace the One Ring because he wouldn't find it very important, and since the Ring is the source of Sauron's power, I think we can assume that Tom is more powerful than the main villain of the entire series.
I'll stop now, because the complicated details were not what I wanted to get into here, and I'm also not an expert, so I don't want to get stuff wrong. It gives you a taste, though, of how complex and thought-out all this is. There's so much that the books got into that the movies didn't, obviously, but there's so much more even beyond what the books addressed. That's what allows things like the Middle Earth games to exist and remain so close to the world that Tolkien created.
One of the main characters of the game that I was playing, Shadow of Mordor, is Celebrimbor, who I'm almost positive you've never heard of unless you've played the same game. While the writers did expand on his history a bit to make him a more complete character for the story they were telling, he is taken directly from Tolkien's work, an Elvish master smith who forged the three superior rings of power that were given to the Elves.
I like to think I'm pretty good at writing, and creating believable settings for my stories. I can't begin to imagine creating something on Tolkien's level, or with his legacy. It's obvious that he loved the world, and I think that's a huge part of why so many other people love it too.
