Brinniel - that sounds like a mammoth project! I'm glad I didn't have that much school work back when I was there or I'd never have had time to read any Tolkien!
Anyway, I managed to pull off this feat myself. We used to write little reviews in the backs of our English books of any new books we'd read. Of course I wrote my little bit about The Hobbit and LotR way back then. I've still got the books somewhere so I'll have to look up what I wrote!
Now, I didn't get much chance to
study Tolkien, but he was certainly an inspiration for my other work. Of course, Art brought the opportunity to create pictures of characters, scenes and places from Tolkien's work, and I of course drew the obligatory picture of Boromir, stuck full of arrows (with a bit of red pencil to represent the blood) and Aragorn crouched over him. Then there were of course drawings of ethereal Elves with pointy ears, big upward slanted eyes and impossibly long and thin bodies.
In one year we were given a scenario each week in English lessons which centred around a fantasy story line - we came up with characters and had to write about what they did to get out of the situation for homework. the next week we would receive info on the next obstacle. A few pages of story would have sufficed but I filled up one whole exrecise book with each bit of the story, embellishing with backstory, history and random fragments of weirdness. I had a slightly surly Wizard, a brave and sensible Dwarf, a gobby Hobbit, an Elf who cast a lot of spells and a broken sort of a Man with a violent streak for my characters and invented my own Dark Lord. Poor English teacher. I wonder if she read it all? I do still have those books somewhere, too!
Later on during my time at school this Dark Lord I had invented would pop up in random stories I had written at random moments just for the fun of it. So as a 17 year old I might be writing an earnest tale about urban life and the Dark Lord would suddnely pop up in a cafe or something and turn the plot on its head. Very post-modern.
My teacher at the time used to look forward to this and ask what he was going to do next and when I'd use him again, but I kept her in suspense.
Finally I even managed to write about Tolkien in Oxford entrance exams as from one of the essay papers I chose to answer a question about sense of place in literature. I looked at how writers constructed imagined places and made them into characters in their own right, using Egdon Heath from Return of the Native, the Bronte's Yorkshire Moors and Tolkien's The Shire.