[Celuien]

I conassign the following conversation to Mordor:

I was sitting in the lounge on a break to read the Downs when the other student on my team walked in. He looked over my shoulder and said, "The Barrow-Downs! Cool!"

At first I was delighted. Had I unexpectedly found another Downer in my class? Alas, it was not to be. He went on.

"Yeah. That's great. Isn't that the place where Dwarves live under the ground and have mines in this video game?" (I forget the game he named.)

I paused a moment, a little surpirsed, and explained the origins of the Downs, even pulling up the BD theme from the main page for more information. My classmate's eyes glazed over.

"You've got to be kidding me. The Barrow-Downs." He had a superior sniff in his voice. "It's something else they stole from the video game for that Lord of the Rings stuff."

At this point, my jaw is on the floor. The first thought I had was he must be joking. There was that parody news article about how Tolkien stole storylines from Dungeons and Dragonsm after all. So I sort of laughed and asked him if it was a joke. But he was serious. Completely serious. And went on to spend a good half hour trying to convince me that the LOTR is a "Hollywood sanitized-for-movie-audiences by Tolkien, less violent and less thematically complex" version of Heroes of Might and Magic.

I was in shock. "You do realize, of course, that Tolkien wrote the books a few decades before video games were invented."

"But this is a really old video game," he replied.

Which led to my pulling out publishing dates for the LOTR, draft dates for the Silmarillion and the attempting to find an approximate origin of this Heroes and Might and Magic business. The conversation ended with his capitulating that maybe, just maybe the LOTR came first. But he continued to state that the video game had the better story because "things aren't so black and white in the video game and they have better battles."

I groaned and buried myself in reading Werewolf.