The history of the Tolkien Archives begins back in 1997. Paul Martyniak and Bryan Costa registered a site at Geocities and called it the "Tolkien Archives".  As Geocities sites go, it was fairly low budget and small-time.  On August 26, 1998 the two creators moved to a new server.   They redesigned the site and reworked some of the information that was present.

I was a just out of high school, a freshman at Virginia Tech, studying computer science.  I spent more time online than I did in class; part of my activities centered around gathering Tolkien artwork from various sites around on the 'Net.  As strange as this may sound, "back in 1998" there was not the glut of Tolkien-related material online there is today.  There were few sites that really offered what I wanted in a Tolkien site.  I began to think of a way to remedy that.

In late October I met Matthew Bass in alt.fan.tolkien and, as often happens, became good online buddy's with Matt.  He also shared a similar wish -- to see a Tolkien site that "has it all".  A tough order to fill, as we both found out in the next few months.  Matt owned a hosting company and offered space for a repository of Tolkien related info.  Coming up with the name "The Tolkien Archives", we designed a simple site, and began the gathering process.  Poetry, artwork, essays, photographs -- we had dreams of holding it all.   We often laboured over what content should be included in such an archive:   was it to be solely for display of Tolkien paraphrenalia, or should we branch out to include material from other people?  We decided on the latter, and continued with our site.

Around mid-November -- November 15th to be exact -- Matthew informed me that our site shared the same name as another site -- the site run by Paul Martyniak and Bryan Costa.  We met online to discuss the possibility of merging the two sites, and after a few weeks, on December 1, 1998, synchronized our data and converted both sites into a single design.

In April of 1999 Matt and I caught wind of rumours of a Lord of the Rings movie.  Investigating, we found a site that had been actively reporting the progress of the films since 1997 and were asked by the webmaster to take over research and reporting for him.  The responsibility of such a task required focus and determination.  Matt took up the challenge and took over full-time coverage of the LotR movie new site, located at tolkien-movies.com.

On August 7, 1999, Matt and I gained full control over the Archives while Paul and Bryan went their own ways.  We revamped the entire site, began updating once again, and by the end of the summer we had a #1 site listing on Yahoo! and were rolling high.  The Tolkien Archives once again regained a sort of "dominance" on the 'Net for Tolkien sites.  Matt and I were soon to part ways, however, as the Movie site became very popular.  News of the upcoming film was always seen first on Tolkien-movies.com, to which I attribute Matt's diligence in maintaining it.  I stayed on staff with Matt to help out with Movie updates and site maintenance, and took over full-time maintenance of the Archives.

December of 1999 saw many changes to the Archives, including a redesign which failed to capture the enthusiasm of the Tolkien community.   I immediately redesigned the site to be much simpler and more "folksy", less technically appealing but more community-based.  This proved to be a hit, and so it remained.  That design has stood until now, January of 2002.

And that about brings us up to the present.  As always, I have plans for the site which I hope I can complete.  The real task is figuring out how to make the time for all this.  I anticipate another exciting and fun-filled year.  With your support, I think I can rest easy.  Many thanks.

--Jeremiah Lewis, webmaster