Lord of the Rings — September 2022
Michelle Frayman: Both my sons love the LOTR movies, but my younger son Max developed a deep passion for both the books and the movies. He loved the movies so much he asked me to make him an Eye of Sauron cake for his birthday one year.
Given his great love for all things Tolkien I thought I would ask him to write this month’s blog post as I could think of no one better to sing the praises of the fascinating worlds Tolkien created.
Max Preston
When I first watched The Lord of the Rings movies I was amazed at the stunning sets and the story of an unsuspecting hero defeating evil against all odds. They soon became some of my favorite movies (along with Star Wars of course). During the pandemic I, like many other people, found myself with a lot of time on my hands so I found our copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and I started reading them. I greatly enjoyed them so the obvious next step for me was to read the other books Tolkien wrote like the Silmarillion. At this point I was a devout Tolkien fan and started trying to get my older brother to read them (I don’t think he will ever let me recommend books again considering how many times I bugged him about it). My point is that I love Tolkien but I do also find it quite hard to keep track of all the names of people, places, and events. I believe that data visualization might make it much easier for many more people to enjoy the books as well as the movies.
Tolkien spent a good portion of his life creating a vast world with a detailed history. Tolkien started this history at the creation of Arda (a little before actually) and then created important events and people to populate this world for the next 10,000 years. World building is an important part of writing a fictional story and Tolkien went above and beyond with his. Tolkien even created whole new languages for the denizens of Arda to speak. It can be very hard to understand and remember every little detail no matter how many times you read the books. There is a lot of variation in the life expectancies of all the races and some of them changed over time (specifically that of humans) which could be interesting to graph. The Silmarillion is basically a timeline for Arda and different amounts of time are spent discussing the events of different times. Data about that could be used to see what Tolkien spent the most time on.
Data
We have provided datasets on the characters of Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion, as well as information specific to the movies and some soundtrack information. Click here for the Data.World website.
You can also pull your own data from The LOTR Project or information on the books from this Github repository.
When you’re done, be sure to post on Twitter as well as submit to the tracker, link here.
We look forward to your vizzes!
