My dad's family were miners in Cornwall and then moved to the UP of Mighigan. By the time I came along, everyone had moved again down to Detroit to get jobs in the auto factories. Our family lived in a fairly tough but close knit urban neighborhood with too much crime. Families were happy if they could persuade their kids to finish high school. I remember a a lot of warm family things from my childhood but Detroit had so many problems....an auto industry starting to teeter, anger between management and labor, mistrust between people of different races and backgrounds, the riots of '67. and young people starting to rebel against the indifference and problems that were all around them.
I dealt with this situation in several ways. I was politically active but also buried myself in books by Nesbit and Lewis and T.H. White and read a lot of history. By 1961, I'd finished the Hobbit and, two years later, the Lord of the Rings. I was totally captivated, not just with the story but the original sources I could feel lurking on the edge of the text and the love of the environment that Tolkien so clearly incorporated in his writing. I read medieval history and literature with a serious vengence.
I started out as a solitary reader who had no idea others shared these passions. It wasn't until I went to college in 1966 that I discovered that I wasn't the only one who was batty about Tolkien. I attended a small liberal arts college in the midwest. As college students, we plastered Remington posters on our dorm walls, wore "Frodo Lives" buttons, baked bread from scratch and lived simply in communes, did tutoring and community work in inner city neighborhoods, marched, protested, and chained ourselves to the front doors of administration buildings on campus....a lot of good, a lot of bad, and a lot of craziness all mixed up. Somehow all these things naturally went together. I was part of the group that made JRRT scratch his head in puzzlement.
We were so fed up with our immediate past that we tossed out a lot of the good with the bad, but the "bad" really needed to be cleared out.
One interest led to another and I ended up going on to to earn a doctorate in English medieval history. That would never have happened without the influence of both Tolkien and White. I managed to spend a lot of time in the UK as an au pair, a student at the University of Wales, and later on doing research at the British Museum, in the Public Records Office, and, most fun of all, in a few of the larger stately homes where there were peacocks strutting all over the lawn. (Definitely a new thing for a girl from Detroit.)
It seems that medieval history and lit attract a lot of folk who love Tolkien (or sometimes reading Tolkien sends them into medieval history and lit). That was true in the past and still seems to be true today. There is a conference in Kalamazoo. It's still one of the biggest medieval conferences in the U.S. I went to college in Kalamazoo when it was just getting started. I remember helping my medieval history prof set up the first panel on Tolkien and LotR back when I was an undergrad in the late 60s. That conference and the sessions on Tolkien are still going on today.