Tolkien. He is the president and founder of the Mythgard Institute, a new online teaching center for the study of Tolkien and other works of imaginative literature. His website and podcasts, where Dr. Olsen brings his scholarship on Tolkien to the public, are extremely popular. The site has attracted more than 1.8 million visitors since its launch and there have been more than 275,000 downloads of his podcasted lectures. The producers at the History Channel took notice, inviting Dr. Olsen to discuss Tolkien as part of their series, "Clash of the Gods." He earned his B.A. in English and astrophysics from Williams College and his Ph.D. in medieval literature from Columbia University.