J.R.R. Tolkein put a lot of detail into the world of Lord of the Rings, and one avid fan has cataloged all of those details to produce lots of charts, like this one of Middle Earth's population by race and sex. Emil Johansson, a chemical engineering student at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden's complex interactive documentation of the books is called The Lord of the Rings Project. It includes data on 923 characters from The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and posthulously published books.

As you can see, almost all of them — whether humans, elves, hobbits or dwarves — are male with just 19 percent of all Tolkein characters being female.

"The low number of females is not due to lack of females in Middle-Earth but due to the fact that Tolkien did not describe many of them," Johansson explains. In other words, ladies existed, Tolkein just didn't write about them.

To see the rest of the extensive project, go to lotrproject.com.

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at sdai at theatlantic dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.
Serena Dai