In 1917 as the war rages on, recuperating in hospital from trench fever, contracted in that same hell-hole, a 25-year-old South African-born soldier has already decided to leave this ghastly world behind by transporting himself through his own vivid imagination to a completely different dimension of his dreams. He calls this other place Middle-Earth. It is the subject of a book he is writing as a vehicle for his escapism: The Silmarillion.

As the years pass, Middle-Earth evolves into a wondrous place peopled by many different forms of life ranging from elves and dwarves, orcs and goblins, wizards and dragons to some curious little creatures of the young man's own creation known as hobbits. These loveable little hairy-footed creatures start to appear in the (real world) 1920s just around the time the young man is married and beginning to tell tales of Middle-Earth to his small children at bedtime. One hobbit in particular is most popular with the children and endures countless adventures in the stories told about him. He is even named after one of the children's teddies, Bilbo and in the stories he has a nephew named after another such toy, Bingo.

By 1937, the children are growing up but the stories have become so rich and the land of Middle-Earth so well-developed that our young man, now 45 years of age and a professor of Oxford University in England, finally agrees to publish the stories of Bilbo in the now classic children's fantasy adventure, The Hobbit. Our man is of course one of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century: JRR Tolkien. His book, The Hobbit, went on to sell over 40 million copies around the world since that initial publication. It seems that he was not the only person interested in escaping the gritty reality of our world.

However, Tolkien's book was no ordinary tale of wizards and dragons and was quickly elevated from the fairy tale genre because of the incredible depth he presented us in his world of Middle-Earth. The Hobbit would give but a glimpse of this great depth through a variety of maps, mythologies, languages, poetry and songs. Tolkien's characters were far from the one-dimensional heroes and villains of typical children's tales. They had well-developed personalities as in any good story but they also had the further dimensions of culture and history, even destiny- all of which are richly drawn throughout The Hobbit and even more so in Tolkien's later published works.

Tolkien's extensive creativity in these other dimensions stemmed from his own hobbeys and personal interests. Primary among them was philology - the study of the historic origin and architecture of languages. His principle study was of the Middle English language of Anglo-Saxon. This was the subject he taught at Oxford. Study of this ancient and highly influencial language gave access to one of the oldest surviving heroic poems from England's past: The legendary story of Beowulf. Tolkien was fascinated with Beowulf. He wrote two academic papers on the subject and assisted with its translation to modern English.

However, Tolkien's language interests were not confined to Anglo-Saxon or even ancient English. He was a student and collector of all languages, especially ancient language and his explorations into and understanding of how languages are formed was reflected in the languages he created himself for the different races in his world of Middle-Earth. One language in particular that captured his imagination was Finnish- this language along with the Finnish nation had looked like it was becoming extinct in the early nineteenth century until it was recovered. documented and taught through the aid (as in ages past) of an epic poem, much like Beowulf, known as the Kalevala.

These fascinating insights into the background and influences of JRR Tolkien and his Middle-Earth epics have been explored and documented in great and glorious detail in the National Geographic's documentary 'Beyond the Movie - The Lord of the Rings' (DVD release 16th February 2002). A publishing institution like the National Geographic have dedicated this amount of interest and investment into Tolkien's work largely because of one fact: The incredible success of the 2001 movie, Lord of the Rings.

In November 2001, the movie opened and within the first weekend made over $18 million at the box office making it the biggest grossing opening weekend for a movie since Star Wars. Peter Jackson's movie is a triumph of the cinematic art form, finally succeeding in bringing the spectacular world of Middle-Earth to the screen using live-action with just a little help from sophisticated computer animation.

Filmed on location in New Zealand, the movie is quite a spectacle and indeed justified the enormous budget and magnificent cast but it was always bound to draw huge crowds considering the massive and ongoing popularity of Tolkien's book, almost half a century old by the time the live action movie was finally released.

From the start, the book The Lord of the Rings was highly influential but it had its fair share of detractors among critical circles, largely in the shape of those who felt it lacked the academic purity that might be expected from an Oxford don seeking recognition for, apart from anything else, his philological works (of which Tolkien considered The Lord of the Rings to be one). However, the critics were soon quieted as among others rushing to the defence of the man were his fellow inklings. The inklings was a group of writers and poets with common interests and styles including C.S. Lewis. Lewis, who is best-known for his own fastasy adventure creation 'The Chronicles of Narnia' simply declared the work of his friend to be brilliant. A taste of the life of an author and Oxford professor is available in the movie 'Shadowlands' which tracks a romantic episode in the life of C.S. Lewis.

The inklings were right. Tolkien's work went on to inspire any number of imitations, references, even sub-cultures. Witin a decade of its publication, during the revolutionary and turbulent sixties, college students started to employ its characters as icons for their rebellion from a hugely displeasing world.

Within a decade, as the computer generation approached maturity, countless system administrators continued the trend of identifying with characters and places in the books, naming their computers and servers after them.

The ultimate manifestation of escapist fantasy emerged soon after in the form of a role-playing game revolution: Dungeons & Dragons took tremendous lead from the Middle-Earth fantasies in its complexity and depth and in the supernatural world its players inhabited. This game and thousands of spin-offs grew increasingly popular in the latter three decades of the twentieth century, immortalising the genre pioneered by Tolkien in his Middle-Earth novels.

Ever since Tolkien put pen to paper and finally gave us the long awaited follow-up to The Hobbit in 1954, movie-makers have been trying to commit his great other-worldly epics to film. His creatures and action were so fantastic that even the first really serious attempts were not possible using live actors but instead had to rely on the medium of animation. Even this idea was resisted for a long time for fear that a "cartoon" version of Tolkien's masterpieces would somehow cheapen the beautifully crafted works.

Finally, it took the courage of a radical New York artist to break the taboo. The artist, Ralph Bakshi, an often controversial Brooklyn-born animator with a reputation for producing ground-breaking animated features for mature audiences, embarked on his project to commit his interpretation of The Lord of the Rings to film in the mid-seventies. His movie was finally released in 1978 only to be met with controversy characteristic of this man's work: Although the movie's publicity heralded this movie as the first to transcribe all three parts of the story to film, officionados of the book were shocked and upset to find, as they sat in the movie theaters, that in fact only the first part of the story ('The Fellowship of the Ring') was granted reasonable coverage.

The Bakshi movie met with critical outcry as a result and due to some of the techniques adopted in that movie and something of a loss of direction towards the end of the movie which hints at the production team running short of funds, time and inspiration towards the end, today this movie has its fair share of detractors. Nonetheless Bakshi's effort was nominated for a Golden Globe award and remains a very brave attempt to tackle a subject that previously had dissuaded many and in so doing, to only augment the experience of those many fans of the stories who constantly crave more. Its clever rotoscoping style and dark and menacing atmosphere make this movie a permanent member of the family of Lord of the Rings cultural pieces.

Around the same time this movie was released, further animated reproductions were attempted first of The Hobbit and then of the last part of The Lord of the Rings, The Return of The King by television production team, Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass. Once again these movies met with their fair share of critical derision as might be predicted, being accused of simplifying, even cheapening the quality of the Tolkien topic. Nonetheless they remain brave attempts at bringing Middle-Earth to life and greatly-loved by many many fans to this day. Two decades later, the art of animation had been revolutionised by the advent of the computer and particularly graphic live-action effects that have since become norm in large studio productions. Nowadays it is possible to simulate entire slive-action features without a single actor stepping into a single live location. On the strength of this, it has become much more realistic for film-makers to delve into the worlds of fantasy first brought to us from the minds of great literary luminaries like Tolkien.

Moreover the fantasy adventure genre made famous if not wholly inspired by Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, has never been more popular that it was at the start of the new millenium. This fact was shown not only by the mammoth success of The Lord of the Rings movie release in 2001 but by the only movie to beat it at the box office, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Both movies quickly rose to the top fiteen grossing movies of all time, sweeping the floor with the rest of the industry. The Lord of the Rings alone added to its comercial popularity with critical acclaim umbering no less than thirteen Oscar nominations.

Among the recogniiton came plaudits for the remarkable cast. For example, in the role of Saruman the White, was no less a legendary monster actor than Christopher Lee, known especially to fans of English classic Hammer Horror movies. Lee was to Hammer Horro what Karloff was to Hollywood horror. His first appearance as the archetypal monster for that cult production studio came in The Curse of Frankenstein, 1957, the same year that the last of The Lord of the Rings parts was published. Forty-four years later and here he was still paying the villain in The Lord of the Rings movie.

Another connection too existed between Lee and the actor portraying his nemesis, Gandalf the Grey, following the same thread. The Curse of Frankenstein was a remake of the even more popular and world famous 1931 Hollywood production of the Frankenstein movie, artfully and beautifully directed by James Whale. In the late nineties, Whale's real-life story was captured in the movie Gods and Monsters with Ian McKellen (Gandalf) playing the part of the man himself. In the next in our series of Movie Cubes, we will be taking a deeper look into the whole Frankenstein story and that of its creator, Mary Shelley to celebrate the release on DVD of the movie: Gothic.