About Your Hosts
Chad High has been a Tolkien enthusiast since the early 1990's when he read The Hobbit for the first time. He has never read anything by The Professor that didn't bring him joy. He is a bit of a collector and by his reckoning has one of the bigger collections in the state of Texas. He currently chairs the Houston Tolkien Society, nicknamed The Friends of Mr. Underhill
His favorite characters are including, but not limited to Bilbo Baggins, Samwise the Brave, Finrod Felegund, and Melian the Maia, but this seems to change on a daily basis.
When he's not working on his Tolkien hobbies, Chad is probably paying the bills with his day job as a teacher/lecturer to history and economics students in Houston TX. Or he's spending time with his wonderful wife of 15 years and daughter.
Chad Bornholdt was exposed to Tolkien in 1977 by Ralph Bakshi but he went Tolkien-crazy after the first Peter Jackson trailer, reading “The Lord of the Rings” & “The Silmarillion” before Jackson’s first movie debuted. His primary goal is making learning easier for the next person, & has therefore made several tools to aid in Legendarium comprehension.
He is mostly a fact-gatherer & not much of a speculator, & therefore entertains all reasonable conclusions. His favorite passages are the ‘Manwë worthy’ ones: Characters’ integrity-depicting events worthy of an Eagle-rescue.
Besides Tolkien, Bornholdt has many hobbies: Racecars, difficult music, real estate, & American football. Bornholdt enjoys work as a Distributive Control System Process Automation Programmer in Houston, TX & lives in rural Mont Belvieu, spending time with his wife, Claire, her daughter, Ashley, & his son, Michael.