Xenite.Org News

Tolkien and Middle-earth essays move to MERP.COM

April 27, 2003 at 22:02:27

Michael Martinez has launched a new monthly Tolkien and Middle-earth essay column on the popular MERP.COM Web site.

Earlier this year, Martinez (the founder of Xenite.Org) severed a relationship with Suite101.com which had lasted since late 1998, when he launched their Hercules and Xena topic with bi-weekly essays on the popular syndicated action/adventure television shows. At one time, Hercules and Xena were the top-ranked syndicated shows in the world, and were seen in more than 80 countries around the globe.

In 1999, as interest in the Peter Jackson movies began to swell, Martinez changed topics for Suite101. He began writing about Tolkien and Middle-earth on a weekly basis in August of that year, and by 2001 (when the first movie was released) he was widely recognized as the Internet's leading authority on Tolkien's works. Yahoo! Internet Life, TV Guide Magazine, Wired Online, and other media sources included Martinez in their roundups of Tolkien experts and pundits.

Interest in Tolkien's fiction and the imaginary past of our world he created for his stories about hobbits, elves, wizards, and warriors proved to be so strong, in October 2000 Martinez self-published Visualizing Middle-earth, a collection of essays, many of which were originally written for Suite101.

At the beginning of 2002, Martinez published a free eBook, Parma Endorion: Essays on Middle-earth, 3rd edition in conjunction with fan artists Anke Eissmann and Rich Sullivan. The eBook quickly became the most popular eBook of 2002 and to date has been downloaded more than 250,000 times from Free-EBooks.Net.

Although the weekly format for the essays gave way to a monthly publication schedule in late 2001, the Suite101 topic continued to grow in popularity. At one point, it was the only part of Suite101 being indexed by the Google search engine when the Suite had accidentally been reclassified as spam Web site (a mistake Google rectified).

MERP.COM, launched in 1998, is a player-operated gaming community devoted to all forms of Middle-earth related role-playing. With more than 2500 registered users, MERP.COM hosts a variety of forums and mailing lists, gaming resources, news, and artwork, and other functions of interest to Tolkien gamers and Tolkien fans in general.

The old Suite101 essays have been archived but are (presently) still available for the public to browse. Full copyright has been retained by Michael Martinez and eventually the essays may be republished on Xenite.Org. Suite101 may take their archive offline at a time of their choosing.