John Callender

I've been a Tolkien fan for the past 25 years or so. I'm primarily distinguished in the world of obsessive Tolkien fandom by having been the submitter of the fan question (regarding the beefed-up role of Arwen) that received the highest vote total from members of http://www.theonering.net/, such that it was subsequently put to Peter Jackson as part of a videotaped answer-these-silly-questions event, eliciting PJ's chuckling admonition that those in a tizzy re: Arwen's role "should just relax" (which, in retrospect, was good advice).

Additionally, I wrote the book Perl for Web Site Management (see http://www.elanus.net/book/), which in its original form contained two separate Tolkien quotations, but which, after certain of the book's technical editors questioned their inclusion, I reduced to just one. (That one being Gandalf's line in The Two Towers, "Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves," used in my book to caution beginning programmers to be careful in their use of Perl.)

The other Tolkien quotation in the book, by the way, the one that was removed from the finished version, was also spoken by Gandalf, in the scene where he reappears to Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli in Fangorn. In a passage discussing Unix man pages, and the difficulty new users sometimes have making sense of them, it quoted Gandalf's comments on how the old choose the wisest person present to speak to, because "the long explanations needed by the young are wearying." In retrospect, I really wish I'd kept that quotation in there. Maybe I'll be able to put it back in a future edition.

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