As a boy, I was absolutely fascinated by the appendices in The Return of the King. Tolkien worked with a lot of the same historical materials as other fantasy writers, but the extent to which he transformed it and owned it led to a fantasy world that had absolute self-conviction. It’s a world with dialects, folk songs, bird names, small habits, and grand designs. It seems real because Tolkien took nothing for granted, allowed nothing in his world by default–indeed, it was a world built to justify the languages he’d spent most of his life creating. I was right there with that. I wanted to know where he got all that stuff, and so I started reading mythology. By sixth grade, I had started my great Tolkienesque novel, which of course I never finished. But I kept building worlds.

Greg Keyes