J.R.R. Tolkien passed away on September 2, 1973. He was 81 years old and he might have lived longer had it not been for his love of wine, which his doctor had asked him to abstain from.

I discovered Tolkien's works in 1975, almost two years after he passed away. A friend loaned me her copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which I read in reverse order upon her suggestion because I was so fond of Andre Norton's Witch World.

"If you like Norton, you may like Tolkien," she told me. She was right.

There were three authors who most influenced my love of science fiction and fantasy: Andre Norton, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Each invented worlds and cultures. None of them made the mistakes that other authors stumbled over.

Of course, no one is perfect and Tolkien, Norton, and Burroughs each made their own mistakes. But their stories invigorated my imagination. Their worlds seemed so real and believable in ways that many other authors' worlds failed to.

All three authors had a special gift for a few traits that have come to be associated with Tolkien. They left unanswered questions in their histories. They hinted at more ancient days which their protagonists could only hear about. They explored the fragmentation and evolution of the human spirit.

For Tolkien, Norton, and Burroughs, the worlds in which their stories lived were so real they could not be fully explained. No one had truly investigated all their mysteries. They simply could not provide their readers with infodumps that niched their worlds.

Tolkien's Middle-earth is our world, set in a distant forgotten past time when Men were still young and Elves and Dwarves were both ancient and fading. Any evolutionary biologist could tell you that humankind is quite ancient, having arisen millions of years ago. But modern man is less than 50,000 years old. Tolkien's tales are not about pre-modern men; rather, they are about the first modern men.

We arose from humble beginnings in a world that was inhabited by more ancient men than we. We now call them Neanderthals, and for many years we have disparaged their intelligence and adaptability but the Neanderthals dwelt on this Earth for more than 200,000 years. We have only just matched 25% of that success rate.

Like Tolkien, we look back and see a world more ancient, more distant, and long forgotten -- lands about which we know very little, peoples whose languages we cannot speak.

Norton's science fiction and fantasy often included elements of ancient, forgotten cultures. Her Forerunner stories suggested that a more ancient galactic civilization predated the one we have yet to join. Her Witch World stories gradually unveiled the pattern of immigration/arrival into the Witch World that led to periods of chaos and political turmoil.

Norton's worlds were always being discovered by newcomers who learned that someone had been there before them. Like Tolkien's Middle-earth, Norton's worlds dreamed of ancient glories that could only be barely remembered. Even The Silmarillion is told in a past tense, pushing the events back before the reader's experience -- whereas The Lord of the Rings is very immediate and contemporary for the reader.

Both Tolkien and Norton show the reader the intruder's perspective. We can only glimpse through the doorway the wonders stored in the old people's house. We may be invited across the threshold but we are soon ushered out.

Edgar Rice Burroughs takes us farther into that house than the other two authors. The reader is very intimately familiar with Tarzan, but heroes like John Carter of Mars and Carson Napier of Venus allow us to follow in their footsteps and peek over their shoulders from time to time as they carve new glories into the histories of ancient worlds.

Every adventure story begins with a status quo that is disrupted. The stories have to end with the establishment of a new status quo. Some sense of equilibrium needs to be established. But Tolkien, Norton, and Burroughs loved to keep the reader off balance by suggesting there might just be more to learn than one book (or a dozen) could contain.

Why the past generation should have pegged J.R.R. Tolkien as the archetypal author for weaving stories that draw the reader into a vista of strange-but-familiar worlds is not clear. His writing could be both exceptional and straight-forward, awkward and eloquent. He buried layers within layers and taught us that monsters need not be feared so much as pitied.

In fact, Tolkien's monsters tend to be more complex than other writers' monsters, and perhaps those shades of flawed-once-were-greats help distinguish his writing from everyone else's. Corruption enters into many fantasy venues. The ancient that was good becomes divided into the present that is divided between good and evil.

John Carter found many evil people on Barsoom, but instead of arbitrarily dismissing all the followers of those evil people as evil henchmen, Carter helped them realize their full potentials and overthrow the tyrants who oppressed them. Many of Carter's allies were former enemies.

Burroughs may have provided too much redemption for his antagonists. There was always some madman or dedicated warrior who would not give up, but whole nations eventually gave up the cause and became John Carter fan clubs.

In Middle-earth the enemies are treated with compassion if they are willing to lay down their weapons. They don't become allies so much as complacent, at least for a time. There is always a hint of future conflicts, but those conflicts will produce their own great legends.

Norton's divisions between good and evil tend to be more absolute, but not always so. In some cases we see the good guys become the bad guys, or we see the bad guys realize that they have strayed across a boundary they should not have. For Tolkien, the villains tend to be remote and distant. For Norton, some of the most ancient terrors are just victims waiting to be redeemed.

Tolkien struggled with the idea of redemption and he never quite made up his mind about who could or should be redeemed. Perhaps it was his ambivalence and uncertainty that ensured he would awaken a thousand questions in the minds of his readers.

Tolkien never pretended to have all the answers about the world of his imagination. His imagination was a lense through which he saw a world that was very real to him, very substantial. He struggled to describe it accurately but he refrained from compromising on its structure for most of his life.

The consistency of inconsistency lent magic to Middle-earth that Norton could not conjure up for her galactic empires and magical realms; and Tolkien's eternal quest for answers left Tarzan, Carter, and Napier entrenched in their current events.

The past was more important for Tolkien's characters because it resonated through their present days; but Tolkien's stories captured the essence of human curiosity. His "You Are There" approach to fantasy all but injected the reader into the story, particularly with The Hobbit.

If there was one factor that Tolkien incorporated into his story-telling better than anyone else, it was the occasional narrative aside provided for the reader's benefit. Instead of offering his readers plain and obvious infodumps, Tolkien engaged them in open conversation, even if they didn't always understand exactly what he was saying.

That's why Tolkien still seems so fresh today. He is still engaging his readers, 35 years after he stopped speaking to us directly.