Welcome to Legends of Arda!
Updates:
5th July, 2023
I did not realise it had been so long since I worked on this site. I have finally managed to get all the houses that I want in LOTRO, apart from an elvish themed one and a Halloween/Sauron themed one. I hope to get these done soon, or at least the house for them. I have been finding it difficult to stay interested in the game at the higher levels because my characters are too squishable at those levels, which is probably why I have not been updating as much recently. I also have not been writing fanfic for a very long time since I find getting into the headspace for it difficult due to stress. Roleplaying is something I no longer do because despite multiple attempts at trying to get back into it, I find I have a block of anxiety which prevents me from doing it. I find writing fanfic much more enjoyable even if I have sturggled with concentration for it.
7th March, 2020
Over the past week, I have been adding to the site, mainly character profiles and a template page. (The template page is more to help me, than anything.) If I'd recorded all of those little updates, this page would be very long by now, so I am doig so now. I have not worked out all the pages I want to include under the site information heading on the right - I'm not sure what I need there yet, so I shall do that once I've worked that out and then I'll be sorting out the links there properly, too. For now, I'll link to the profiles here. (Lynds is not completed yet, and I'll probably need to add more to Ori's over the coming weeks as I don't think it's finished but I don't know what to put there yet.)
Lyndheid ! Kili ! Ori ! Bild ! Lofnheid ! Loni 29th February, 2020
Site created.
First of all, I have been a Lord of the Rings/Hobbit fan for a long time. I read both books in college while I studied A-Level Biology and so have been a fan of them even before the first of the trilogies came out. I loved The Lord of the Rings trilogy when I watched it, but at the time I was also a very big Star Wars fan so that really over shadowed what I did in those days. I didn't collect many things, if at all to do with Tolkien, but I did make sure that I bought the Extended Editions of the films instead of the theoretical versions. Even though Star Wars played a bigger part in my fandom life in those days, I did come to consider Lord of the Rings to be the best examples of fantasy and science fiction ever made and still do so today.
Fast forward to 2012, and we have the release of The Hobbit! I was so glad that this time it didn't clash with Star Wars and I was able to enjoy immersing myself into the fandom. The only drawback was that, unlike in the late 90's and early 2000's, there was very little out there in terms of merchandising. I did manage to collect most of the figures (I had none from the Lord of the Rings, sadly), and I collected most of the Lego sets that were released. Some of the larger sets were too expensive, but I was lucky with some of them. As a result, I have a nice collection of LOTR/Hobbit Lego!
One of my favourite fandom activities for Star Wars was writing fan fiction and so I started this hobby up again in relation to the Hobbit this time. Most of my stories have focused on the time period between the Sack of Erebor and reclaiming it from Smaug. There is a lot of history there and I find that of all the races in Middle-earth, I find dwarves and hobbits to be the ones easiest to relate to, with the Beornings and Men of Rohan second. For a time, I was also involved in the role-playing community on twitter but don't delve into it much these days. I prefer solo writing and fan fiction to role-playing as it can be a very frustrating (and demoralising) hobby if you don't find the right people, or if they leave.
I also started playing Lord of the Rings Online, which is really about the only computer game I bother to play. I'm not a big fan of games, but the story, the ease of game play (for most of it) and the setting is what keeps me going back to it. There will be a section in this site for my characters' adventures in the game!