Transcriber: Kelwalin Dhanasarnsombut Reviewer: Tatjana Jevdjic
So I want to start with a number.
And this is a very significant number, actually.
And I hope you'll enjoy to know,
that this is the life expectancy of a hobbit.
And this number is evidence of two things.
The extraordinary amount of work
that Tolkien put into creating the world of Middle Earth
and unfortunately, also evidence of the time I have spend on this project
and the lack of things that I apparently have to do in my spare time.
So, I know you're all thinking the same thing. Well, almost the same thing.
Why would anyone want to know this?
And why would anyone bother to calculate this?
And for me, it just happened. Really.
But everything has a beginning.
And this particular project that I've been working on
has in a way, changed my life
and how I view creativity.
And it has profoundly changed me as a person.
OK. I should say that for approximately 10 months now,
I have been working on a website
trying to explore the world of Middle Earth on the web.
through various projects.
And the main project has been a genealogy,
which is quite big. I'll get to that later.
When I was a child, I used to read a lot of books.
And I was so much encouraged by my mother to do so.
And at one point, she made sure to mention to me
that she though Lord of the Rings was perhaps
a little bit too difficult for me to read.
And you probably remember something similar from your childhood.
And I'm just very happy it wasn't something dangerous you prohibited
but rather reading The Lord of the Rings.
Because just a few months later towards the end of 2000,
I had finished The Return of the King.
So this is the Middle Earth.
And I developed sort of like a bond to Middle Earth.
And I would often drift off in mind,
I won't do it today. Because I'm on the stage, obviously.
But I would often drift off in mind,
imagining being on some grand adventure with Aragorn or Gandalf.
Sort of like a sidekick, I wasn't the main character.
So very modest.
Yes, and it became my way of fleeing reality.
And I'm sure you also recognise this from your childhood,
that you would often flee reality
in one way or another.
Daydreaming as an example.
So I wanted to know more about this world, so I started reading The Silmarillion.
And if you have read The Lord of the Rings,
you know that The Silmarillion is probably --
well, The Lord of the Rings is a bit dry
and it can be considered slightly difficult to read
and I'm the first to admit Tolkien wasn't the best author.
The Silmarillion is even worse, actually.
It's full of characters,
and, with really odd names,
and historical events and masses.
Just to keep my head strait around this,
I started doodling on a paper.
And before I even realised what I have been doing,
I had drawn two gigantic pieces of paper,
two one-by-one meter papers
with the complete Tolkien genealogy.
And this just sort of happened. It wasn't my intent, really.
And I don't think my parents were too pleased about it --
They probably thought I should be doing something else, studying.
But I mean, Tolkien versus studying --
You have to have your priorities straight. (Laughter)
So of course, when I had done this, I wanted to share it.
And this was not something --
What I will show you now is not something I'm particularly proud of.
Because in a moment of weakness and after confusion,
I decided to transfer this analogue version to Excel.
I mean I'm a chemical engineer
and Excel is good with some things, you know,
but definitely not genealogies.
So this is what I came up with. Isn't this beautiful?
Not really. But anyway, I thought, I was young, stupid obviously.
I wanted to share this. So I sent it to a website.
And they apparently rejected it, because they probably though it was ugly.
But they also said that there were too many flaws, too many errors.
And I was devastated. I was 14 years old.
And I was very devastated.
So I went on to do other things. Probably much to the joy of my parents.
So, I didn't pick up on this project until I started Chalmers University.
As a student, if you have been a student,
you know that you have to have something
to be able to flee from the studies.
So this became my way of fleeing studying.
And I was discussing with a good friend of mine, a new found friend of mine, Simon,
creative projects on the web.
And I thought, "I should tell him this dark secret I had,
Tolkien genealogies."
So I did and he thought, "That's pretty cool."
And it kind of ended with him telling me
that "you should put this on the web." And so I did.
And I spent an awful amount of work on the website,
which I published in January.
And I didn't know anything about programming at the time,
but I'm a very experienced Google user.
And that can be enough.
So we went from this to this.
And it's getting larger.
So there are 923 characters there.
And you probably return to the thought,
"Why would anyone do this?"
But I'm getting to that. So it just happened to me.
And of course, publishing something like this,
I didn't really think -- I didn't expect anything to come out of it.
And I certainly didn't expect anyone to really bother,
even sending me an email about it.
But the feedback has been quite tremendous.
And that's probably the reason why I'm here today as well.
I have received hundreds of emails from people.
From teachers who have wanted to use this in their education.
I don't know why. (Laugher)
But I don't have to.
And I won't question it.
And a hotel sent a beautiful email.
They wanted to put this on a wall in their hotel.
And that would be frightening.
So, I want to continue with this project, of course,
since it proved to be so successful.
And I didn't really know what to do,
and during the meantime, there was some media coverage I received.
This passion I have for The Lord of the Rings and day dreaming
suddenly got mentions in Wired, Time Magazine, the Guardian.
And Huffington Post, interestingly enough,
they labeled me "King Geek".
(Laugher) (Applause)
I've still not decided if that's something good or something bad.
But Huffington Post, they're probably never going to write about me again.
So I can say this.
And I'm sure Aftonbladet won't write about me either.
So they're quite similar actually,
in terms of -- Well, I won't get into that.
(Laughter)
Right!
So I wanted to do something more.
I decided that wouldn't it be awesome
if I could do sort of like a timeline of the events, because there are quite many.
And put this next to a map. And I did.
And I came up with this.
And it's not something entirely unique, but I'd rather --
made a composition of something -- a timeline and a map.
And there's a beautiful word for this, which I didn't know until very recently,
it's called geospatial timeline.
Almost sounds like space -- doesn't spell the same,
unfortunately.
And as you [hover] over these events, you will see them on the map.
And I didn't expect this to be a huge success.
But apparently, this is something very new.
And I started getting emails from web-designers and people --
well other people, sorry. I mean, web-designers are people. (Laughter)
But they're rather curious.
So I started getting these emails, and I realized
that this is something worth exploring more.
So I was inspired to do something for you by Carl at TEDx.
He inspired me to extend this thought of the timeline
to something more real.
I mean this is a fictional thing.
But if you extend this to something, if you imagine something more real,
something perhaps more important.
Because there are things more important than this.
If you imagine something that people would be
really genuinely interested about.
For example, World War II.
There is a massive amount of events. This is just a sketch I did.
But there's a massive amount of events
that are important to how this came to play out.
And I think a lot of the patterns in this are lost because there's such
a vast amount of information.
There are patterns in The Lord of the Rings that are lost,
but there are also patterns in the real events like this.
I think to be able to do this would increase the accessibility of the information
for people like me who don't know much, but want to know more.
And I would also like to end with probably the main thing that I have to say here
and it's about creativity.
Because this project has proved to be,
to me, what as a chemist, I call a "catalyst"
for my creativity.
It's unlocked some things that I didn't know exist.
And it has, in a way, made me find my happiness.
I love creating things.
And I think this is very typical
for the world we live in today
that everything has to do with our career.
But we don't always have to make choices that have an impact on our career.
This probably won't have a positive effect on my career.
I don't know yet, but still.
And I want to encourage you to do something just because it's fun.
Because you're passionate about it.
Because you want to feel creative.
And I encourage you to pursue that geeky project
you've been putting off for too long.
Thank you.
(Applause)