Hello friends!

I wanted to take a moment and tell any of you who have not already heard that the Tolkien Experience Podcast has won the 2021 Tolkien Society Award for Best Online Content!

Sara Brown, Sarah Westvik and I are truly honored to receive this award and we are so thankful to the Tolkien Society and its members for their support of our podcast.

I wanted to thank my co-hosts Sara and Sarah for their hard work to make the show as excellent as it is, I could not do it without them! I also want to thank our supporters on Patreon who really stepped up earlier this year when we needed help to keep the show going! Without them, the show would have already ended, so they have literally made it possible for us to keep producing the podcast!

I also wanted to say that we were up against some pretty awesome competition, and that the Alliance of Arda, the Tolkien Art Index, TolkienBooks.us and the Music of Middle Earth podcast are all excellent, and you should check them out!

I also want to thank you, our readers for all of the support you have given me throughout the years, even before the podcast started.

I started the Tolkien Experience Project because I wanted to make a space for everyone to share their personal history with Tolkien’s work and its adaptations. I never dreamed it would become such a wonderful catalogue of fan experiences, or that people would genuinely want to hear a podcast about it! It was my early readers who told me that they wanted a podcast, and I am glad that I had the means to respond to that desire!

If you are reading this, thank you! Even if you don’t listen to the podcast and only read the text project, at this point the two enable each other to exist. We could not have built the one without the other, and we are so grateful for the support and encouragement we have received from each of you!

Finally, I wanted to say: Tolkien Experience is open for EVERYONE! I still hear people say things like “I don’t think my experience is interesting” or “My experience isn’t important”. And I want to take this opportunity to say that those thoughts are not true!

Your experience is wonderful, no matter what shape it takes! If you have read this far into the post, I am guessing that Tolkien has played at least some small part in your life. If so, then your experience of the work has probably helped to make you who you are, and that is a valuable, perhaps even miraculous, thing! If you haven’t shared your experience in the Project, I would love to hear it! I enjoy nothing more than email from people who want to talk Tolkien! So feel free to use my contact page at any time to send me a note!

You can go here to see all of the winners and nominees for this year’s awards!

The Tolkien Society has released their shortlist for their 2021 awards, and my co-hosts and I are delighted and honored that the Tolkien Experience Podcast has made the shortlist for the Best Online Content category!

From the beginning, our goal with the podcast was to create a platform to celebrate the breadth and depth of Tolkien fandom. We wanted to foster a place where people can share their experiences with Tolkien, both praise and criticism.

We are so thankful to all of our guests who have shared their experiences with Tolkien and helped us more fully appreciate his impact on them and on our world.

If you want to see the complete shortlists, they are available here: Tolkien Society Awards 2021

I am humbled just to be nominated, and every nominee, in every category, has truly made the Tolkien community a better place this year, a year when, perhaps, we needed it more than ever.

Thank you,

-Luke

The Tolkien Society has released their shortlist for their 2019 awards, and I am truly humbled that this website has made the shortlist for the Best Website category!

I have tried to make the website a space for honest and open discussion, a place where people can share their experiences with Tolkien. It is only because people have responded to that idea with warmth, generosity, and insight that the Tolkien Experience Project and the larger website are still here at all!

So I wanted to sincerely thank all of the, now almost sixty, contributors to the project and also thank the readers who follow the project and the First Impressions series!

If you want to see the complete shortlists, they are available here: Tolkien Society Awards 2019

I am honored just to be nominated, and every nominee, in every category, has indeed made the Tolkien community a better place this year!

Thank you,

-Luke