Norbert Schürer is a professor in the English Department at California State University, Long Beach. He grew up in Germany and started reading J.R.R. Tolkien as a teenager. He studied English and German literature at the Free University of Berlin and went on to get his Ph.D. from the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University. Now, Norbert teaches the major author seminar on J.R.R. Tolkien (and classes on literary theory, Jane Austen, and 18th-century British literature) at CSULB. His publications include Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: A Reader’s Guide (2004), Charlotte Lennox: Correspondence and Miscellaneous Documents (2012), and Berlin: A Cultural Guide (2014).