The Books Forum

The Books Forum
Contributed by: PotBellyHairyFoot

The Books forum is a knowledge-based forum for the discussion of the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien (and his son Christopher) concerning Middle-Earth. The very knowledgeable Hathaldir has been this forum’s moderator from the beginning and when the membership started climbing, with the release of TTT, I was added to assist her.

Topics can run from simple polls such as “Who is your favorite character in the LOTR series and why?” and basic questions like “How old were you when you read LOTR for the first time?”, right through to more complicated discussions – “Denethor’s Madness” and “No Earthly Honor for Legolas”. Also present are the unsolvable, never ending discussions of such topics as the Balrog’s wings and The nature of Tom Bomabadil and Goldberry. Although much of the discussion is based on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, there are also threads on topics from The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and even the History of Middle-Earth series, to be found in the forum.

The forum is set up so that anyone, no matter what his or her level of knowledge is, can post in an existing thread or start a new thread. If you have only read a book or two and are waiting for the release of ROTK to finish, or if you’ve read everything by and about Tolkien that you can get your hands on, the Books forum should have topics there for you. We encourage everyone, no matter how simple or complicated the topic or question, to feel free to post in the forum. No matter what you wish to know or what topic you wish to post about, there is someone in our membership that can answer your questions or respond to your topic. All we ask is that you read the rules before posting and make sure that a topic is not already being discussed in the forum before starting a new thread.

Lately we are starting to see some deeper discussions of Tolkien in the Books forum, in order to test the abilities of the “scholars” in our membership. Currently this includes discussions into the nature of the heroism of Bilbo and Gandalf, and the psychology of why some of the characters do what they do; as in the previously mentioned Denethor’s Madness thread. We consider these discussions to be very important as they help us here at COE demonstrate that we really are on our way to becoming one of the best Tolkien sites on the Web.