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Such things as charts, tables, maps, and schematics have a way of attracting me, and I have been fascinated by these family trees for about as long as I can remember. I seem to recall spending a good deal of my childhood staring at them, working out the relationship between this hobbit and that, figuring out how old various Bagginses, Tooks, Brandybucks, and Gamgees lived to be, counting Sam's children, and the like. Actually, now that I think about it, it was probably these family trees that sparked an interest in my own genealogy.
Tolkien seems to have very much enjoyed working out not just the big events in his Legendarium, but the minutiae as well, and I think I can understand why. I tend to enjoy these family trees, along with the maps, the lists of kings, and so forth, in much the same way I enjoy reading an almanac or an atlas. There seems to be something enjoyable about mere facts, mere data, when real or at least realistic.
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