News of a website that has a family tree based on The Lord of the Rings has been flying around the Internet, faster than a winged-Nazgûl, for months now. I didn’t get a chance to report on it earlier, but now I am and there are fantastic things going on with it.
The Lord of the Rings Project, which should more aptly be called The Middle-Earth Project as it encompasses more than just the characters that occur in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, is one fan’s attempt at tracing the lineage of all the characters in Tolkien’s fictional universe. Truth be told, calling it The Middle-earth Project is probably not even an adequate enough name for a project of this magnificence.
The project was started by a university student in Sweden named Emil Johansson. Johansson first read The Lord of the Rings trilogy at age 11 and has been hooked ever since. Getting wrapped up in Tolkien’s world, he decided to make it his quest to create a family tree for all the characters. The project would take many years and only recently has found it’s way to the Internet for all to see. At present, the tree contains about 817 characters, and Johansson is being helped along by Shaun Gunner, press officer at The Tolkien Society and administrator of the website Tolkien Gateway.
Visitors of the site can peruse the tree in its entirety or just focus on the different races by choosing from the menu at the top of the page. A floating toolbox also gives the user choices of highlighting certain races in the tree and looking at statistics of the site in the forms of various charts. Users can participate in the project by submitting comments/suggestions/errors to Johansson via the website, Facebook, and Twitter.
The latest exciting news on the project is the imminent release of an app for the Android market. A tweet from Johansson’s Twitter page gives fans a look at two screenshots.
Have a look at two screenshots from the upcoming LotrProject App! news.mymiddle-earth.net/2012/03/07/the… #lotr #tolkien
— Emil Johansson (@lotrproject) March 8, 2012
Hopefully, an iPhone version will follow in the near future for those fans that do not have an Android phone.
To check out Johansson’s work, head over to the The Lord of the Rings Project website. A permanent link has been included in the Elvenesse Blog’s Blogroll and on the website’s Links page.
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