Who is The Purist? And, indeed, why?

The Purist (Full name "The Tolkien Purist", but he doesn't use his middle name) was born in a Lego factory in Salford 1933. After spending some time as a small child, he moved on to becoming a much larger child. Along the way some things happened which he would no doubt believe were extremely funny, but which would only be funny to you if he exaggerated them to the point where they were just another work of fiction. He currently writes comedy about and based on Tolkien, which is altogether more interesting than anything he could genuinely tell you about his life, not least because he hates Biographies anyway on the grounds that they fall into two categories: pleas for indulgent sympathy or santised boasting.

But for those people who think these things are important: The truth.

The Purist was really born in October 1999, when his friend Speedy introduced him to the delights of an online Tolkien Movie discussion forum (Imladris: Lord of the Rings Movie News). It soon became clear that there were far too many lunatics on the site, and so TP appointed himself righter of wrongs, corrector of inaccuracies and splutterer about unneccessary changes to the plot in the film - hence the name. If you need to know the creed whcih gave him identity, it was that the film could and had to make cuts to the plot to fit it all in (especially Bombadil), but that changes were right out.   

But even that got boring, and after a favourable response to the 'Worst Case Scenarios', a collection of the most amusing examples of paranoia on the Imladris site mixed in with TP's own bizarre sense of humour, he realised that what he should really do is take the Maedhros out of everything. In fact, he is no longer sure about his name on the grounds that it reprresents an extremist position which is about as rational and sensible as Anne Widdecombe.

This site contains all those comedy pieces, as well as a story 'Forty Winks', in which a middle aged man is offered a soul-swapping deal by a truly stupid devil, and a smidge of satire.

That's all you're getting. It's probably more than you wanted anyway.

Speedy, 2001.

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