Jed Brophy (Nori), Adam Brown (Ori) Mark Hadlow (Dori), Dean O’Gorman (Fili) Aidan Turner (Kili) John Callen (Oin), Peter Hambleton (Gloin), Stephen Hunter (Bombur), William Kircher (Bifur), James Nesbitt (Bofur),  Graham McTavish (Dwalin).

Also Sylvester McCoy (Radagast the Brown) will be there doing a panel and is signing autographs all 3 days.

Resident hot dwarves Aidan Turner (Kili)  and Dean O’Gorman (Fili) will be signing and hosting photo sessions individually on Sunday only.

Check out the official website for more info! [Official Site] [Tickets]

They have been holding casting sessions all over the country, including Seattle, Chicago, Dallas, Long Beach, and most recently in Phoenix at their Comicon, where this reporter caught up with them. There are two remaining events to earn a chance to be on “The Quest”. The first will be in New York on Wednesday, May 29 at 7pm at Times Scare NYC, located at 669 8th Ave., New York, NY. 10036. For more details and for a chance to attend, look at the flyer image posted with this article. The final casting session will be held at the Philadelphia Wizard Con taking place this coming weekend. For tickets and information about the con, please visit their website at: http://www.wizardworld.com/philadelphia.html

Not much else was mentioned at the Phoenix Comicon event that wasn’t already in the article, except to mention the time commitment. If chosen, you would be given a 5 week block of time to clear, but you would only need to be gone for 3 weeks. The filming will occur sometime during the summer, but not on where it would be, just that you would need a passport. The show will most likely air sometime in the early New Year. The interview process is pretty quick and painless, and the possible rewards endless, so if you live in either NYC or the Philly area, please do try to make it to one or the other.

Lee was born in Belgravia, Westminster, England on May 27th 1922 – making him exactly 91 years old today. We all know his work as Saruman in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings films, but did you know Sir Lee holds the world record for most film acting roles ever ! We at TheOneRing.net would like to continue to offer a good pint of well-earned ale as a toast to a true master of his craft! A better portrayal of Saruman there will never be! Cheers!

[Audio CD] [MP3 Download] [Vinyl]

Tonight will be ‘The Desolation of Smaug: Sneak Peek’ panel from TheOneRing.net in room 122ABC, join us if you are attending comicon. And if you are not going to be able to make the panel, or even make the convention, there is going to be an AZ Ringer Moot on Sunday evening after the end of the convention at the Greenhouse Grill on Adams street right across the street from the convention center and the Hyatt hotel. We will be gathering at 7pm on Sunday night and talking Tolkien and Middle-earth and The Hobbit and whatever else strikes your fancy (for this reporter, that may well be the Los Angeles Kings in the Stanley Cup Playoffs). The restaurant closes at 9pm, but if there are enough Mooters, we can always take the party over to one of the hotel bars. If you wish to attend on Sunday evening, please email me at Garfeimao@TheOneRing.net so I can give the restaurant an approximate attendance by Sunday morning.

This reporter, Garfeimao, will be at the convention all weekend long, but will only be participating in the one panel. The rest of the time, I can be found at one of the many Babylon 5 20th anniversary panels and events, a show that has a definite thematic tie to The Lord of the Rings. For Scifi and Fantasy fans in Phoenix and around Arizona, this is one of the biggest genre events of the year for you, and now you can add Tolkien to the mix.

There is one other Hobbit related panel, on Thursday, May 23 at 6pm there will be a Fan Panel for The Hobbit discussing the current and upcoming films, as well as mentioning previous attempts around the globe. No panelists are listed yet, but this sounds like a lot of fun since it’s more or less a ‘talk back’ session. For information regarding other guests, panels and how to attend, go to Phoenix Comicon. If any of you AZ Ringers want to meet up, feel free to email me at Garfeimao@TheOneRing.net so we can set up a little Moot.

Welcome to our collection of TORn’s hottest topics for the past week. If you’ve fallen behind on what’s happening on the Message Boards, here’s a great way to catch the highlights. Or if you’re new to TORn and want to enjoy some great conversations, just follow the links to some of our most popular discussions. Watch this space as every weekend we will spotlight the most popular buzz on TORn’s Message Boards. Everyone is welcome, so come on in and join in the fun!

The Main and Off Topic Discussion Boards have been hosting TORn’s very own holiday.  Read all about it and join in the games here at the 2013 Founders Day and TORn’s 14th Anniversary Party Links.

On The Hobbit Discussion Board, posters are already anticipating the next 2 films as they anticipate the Epic Scenes that could be shown.  Check out the dreaming here.

Over in the Reading Room, poster Arannir shared a fascinating thought of the Things Tolkien never stated but that you always assumed.  Join in with your assumptions here   OR share your Favourite Tolkien quotations here.

We’ll share more topics next week and hope you can join in on the conversation!  Don’t forget, TheOneRing.net’s Message Boards have over 9,600 registered Tolkien fans, just like you.  Let your voice be heard!

Readers have chosen J R R Tolkien’s classic fantasy tale The Hobbit as the first book to grace the showpiece Centenary Square building.

Builders hand the library over the city council on Monday, and an army of workers is set to begin the mammoth task of putting more than 400,000 books on the shelves,ready for the doors opening to the public on September 3.

Library chiefs asked readers to choose which book should have the honour of being first, putting out an appeal on social networking site twitter.

And The Hobbit, scenes from which are said to have been inspired by Tolkien’s childhood in Birmingham, took the No 1 spot.

[Read more]

Founders Day is TheOneRing.net’s official holiday, filled with the best that a virtual party can offer.  If you’re new(er) to the site, it’s a chance to find out about the roots of the site, about the four founders, and to say thanks to the people who keep this place going.

If you’ve been around for a bit, it’s a great day to reminisce, tell war stories, and reflect on all the adventures and friendships that have been forged over the years.

Look for a few special party threads on our message boards (mostly on Main and Off Topic)— so don’t be shy! Hunt around, find a party game you like, or a conversation you enjoy, and dive in!

Here’s to our Founders (from left to right below: Corvar, Xoanon, Tehanu, Calisuri). Happy 14th TORNiversary, TheOneRing.net!

As part of our celebrations every year we reprise posting the TORn ‘Valequenta’ below. The TORn ‘Valequenta’ was written by member Alassëa Eruvende and set most beautifully to paper by our dear friend Daniel Reeve, calligrapher and artist for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies. Enjoy!

Much too hasty,

Quickbeam

————————————–

Follow Quickbeam on Twitter:  @quickbeam2000

Follow TheOneRing.net on Twitter:  @theoneringnet

It started when this year’s MTV Movie Awards announced their vote-in contest for the category “Best Hero” — allowing Instagram and Twitter users to employ hashtags like #VoteIronMan or #VoteHulk — and especially of interest to this phenomenon #VoteBilbo. A few days actually went by without us even noticing there was a contest. Over Easter weekend the staff of TheOneRing.net was working to deliver a great presentation before packed crowds (many hundreds in the standing-room-only hall) at WonderCon, happening right on the tail of a very successful April Fool’s Day prank — so no wonder we were looking elsewhere.

TheOneRing.net first brought attention to the contest on April 3rd with this tweet:

Bilbo needs your help! Losing to kristen stewart @mtv movie awards #votebilbo contest mtv.com/ontv/movieawar…

— TheOneRing.net (@theoneringnet) April 3, 2013

We saw that Kristen Stewart’s character Snow White (from that hunky HUNTSMAN movie) had a stunning 13,556 votes, far more than the other nominees… while poor Mr. Baggins was in very last place with only 226 votes.  A pathetic showing that would have me old Gaffer shaking his head in shame.

By using Twitter to muster our troops, within a mere 24 hours we saw a mighty surge of thousands of votes — yes THOUSANDS — and it kept going strong from there. We hit the Twitterverse so hard that #VoteBilbo started trending, everyone outside of our community actually picked up on it, K.Stew quickly lost her lead (causing her fanbase to respond), and thus “The Great Battle of the Fandoms” was in full swing.

We realized that TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN fans were supporting their chosen actress, *not* the character she portrayed, a bit of irony not lost on us.  The category “Best Hero” did not really mean “Best Actress You’re A Fan Of From Another Franchise Because You Didn’t Really Watch This Movie.” Their rigorous support for the actress rather than the character made the whole contest a bit of a sham, in that context. Rather unfair, in this Ent’s personal opinion, that a true statement of how we regard our heroes was being skewed so badly. Undoubtedly Twi-hards have been a huge segment of MTV’s target audience, and plenty of naysayers told us that we didn’t have a chance to tip the scales. We were glad to have a challenge: a task to show what genuine fan-love of a heroic character really looks like, with numbers not seen since the Muster of Rohan!

The meteoric trending of #VoteBilbo caught everyone’s attention. Warner Bros. Pictures officially supported the effort with this missive from their Twitter account ‘TheHobbitMovie’ on April 5th, which spurred tens of thousands of new votes:

Our burglar, Bilbo Baggins, is nominated for Best Hero atthe 2013 MTV Movie

Awards! Cast your vote now by using #votebilbo

—

The Hobbit (@TheHobbitMovie) April 5,

2013

The other nominees were floundering: Batman and Catwoman were left in the dust of a deserted Gotham City as Bilbo VS. Snow White became a runaway viral showdown. But the numbers were not quite right. Certain fake Twitter accounts (spam-style “bots”) were discovered processing blank-except-for-the-hashtag #VoteSnowWhite tweets, but they were reported and shut down.  Our support for Mr. Baggins was quite organic, and the funny thing was that votes were not coming from some hardcore group of Martin Freeman supporters, though they exist, but rather from Tolkien-lovers who really wanted to make a true statement about Bilbo Baggins.

April 6th proved to be a huge day! The media-watch group WHO TRENDED IT? posted this tweet on April 6th, giving TORn proper credit:

Guess what ! #votebilbo trending in the US ? @theoneringnet did it ! Now, that’s badass. Even as a cold hearted robot, I’m impressed.

— Who Trended it ? (@WhoTrendedIT) April 5, 2013

Then our friend Emil Johansson at the LOTRProject Blog gave us something masterful: he launched a special page to show statistics of the voting and how it changed in real-time. He tweeted this:

I have developed a page tracking the results for #votebilbo and MTV Best Hero Award. Please share. lotrproject.com/projects/voteb…

— Emil Johansson (@lotrproject) April 6, 2013

Within his wonderful vote-tracker page we could see exactly what was going on, relative to the timing of our announcements on TheOneRing.net (and our Facebook timeline and Twitter, of course). When there was doubt our votes were less than stellar, we rallied again!

Stars from the LOTR Film Trilogy and even newer actors from THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY jumped on board! Their timing was perfect — and because these actors are actually paying attention to what fans are saying on Twitter, it felt like a genuine grassroots effort was brewing. We had tweets from Dominic Monaghan (Meriadoc Brandybuck) and Dean O’Gorman (the dwarf Fili) on the same day Evangeline Lilly (upcoming new character Tauriel) retweeted our comments — pleased as we were to ultimately learn that retweets counted as full votes!):

#votebilbo

— Dominic Monaghan (@DomsWildThings) April 6, 2013

#votebilbo !

— Dean o’gorman (@Deanogormano) April 6, 2013

Then Sean Astin (my favorite hobbit) joined the fray:

A vote 4 Bilbo #votebilbo Is a Vote for My old Gaffer!!!!{Who you remember worked for Bilbo}. Take 2 secs tic the box-I’ll cook u taters

— Sean Astin (@SeanAstin) April 7, 2013

More ambitious creative folks within our Ringer ranks started posting videos designed to bring a smile to your face as well as playfully jab at Bella Swan  — and MTV reported on it, realizing that the race was getting quite aggressive between the two camps. ‘If you liked it then you shoulda put a Ring on it’ had a whole new meaning with Speigel Ei’s Vimeo clip:

single-bilboooo from Spiegel Ei on Vimeo.

“HOBBIT fans went straight for the gut of Team #VoteSnowWhite,
who have to watch as several of the characters from Middle-earth court
Kristen Stewart to their side over Edward Cullen,” declared the MTV blog, and we realized this was indeed a chance to show our resplendent fandom in a unique way. The fact that we have been in love with Tolkien’s HOBBIT characters for 75 years since the book was first published supported the sky-high numbers of votes.

HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF VOTES POURED IN DAILY. When the final weekend of the Awards telecast began on April 13th, we broke 1 million votes. K.Stew voters were trying to keep up; sometimes we crossed above or below their high-end total. Fans started to create one-click Twitter vote buttons, and we supplied a host of #VOTEBILBO avatars and funny images to become viral memes. Fans started creating their own images (with familiar LOLcat fonts) and sharing them.

Our lovely lady friends Kili and Fili from our HAPPY HOBBIT video channel did a fun little P.S.A. style announcement asking Ringers to bring their votes to bear! We were really building momentum as a community. There was more spirited fun to be had with this contest than we first suspected!

Did we have crossover from other fantasy fans? You betcha! *wink* GAME OF THRONES featured our very own Sean Bean (Boromir) in the first season and of course it was appropriate for him to support his halfling friend.

We were not just sending empty or meaningless tweets with a hashtag in place — we wanted to make this relevant. In an effort to really bring our feelings and honest passion to the center stage, TORn decided to host a concentrated “Tweet Quest” on Sunday April 14th, the day of the MTV Movie Awards. During a tightly-concentrated 1-hour block, and then another encore 1-hour, we asked Ringers to declare why Bilbo should be named ‘Best Hero.’ So we put forward the call to arms.

Boy oh boy, did they respond with a flood of hobbity lovin’!

Fans declared things that mattered to us, that mattered to readers, and as lovers of Tolkien we could certainly relate:  “#VoteBilbo because he was the one person who willingly let the Ring go, when no one else could,” was my personal favorite sentiment. We have an audience that included older-generation folks who had never used Twitter, so we gave quick and easy instructions to help guide our friends toward their goal. We provided everything we could — and most importantly we gave this effort true SPIRIT.

It was a phenomenal success. In the end the final tally was:

#VoteBilbo: 1,637,179

#VoteSnowWhite: 1,532,571

See Emil’s final infographic here!

Giving our furry-footed reluctant adventurer a lead of well over 100,000 to claim the win! Although MTV broadcast the announcement of the winner as a throw-away commercial bumper for Axe body spray (indeed it was shown offstage, not really part of the “actual ceremony”), and although no cast member from THE HOBBIT film was present to receive the award, we here at TheOneRing.net were entirely thrilled to have succeeded with a kind of social networking wizardry that was fueled by you, dear readers.

Such a long way to go from only 226 votes! Such an outpouring of love!

One of our volunteer staffers, Magpie, had this to say: “It was like a flash mob. We did it for us (We defined as the greater Tolkien fan community with TORn functioning a major player in focusing that fan community). It was a community campaign that was an event in itself.”

Staffer Justin who produces our Live webcasts and our weekly show TORn TUESDAY had this to say: “Over 27,000 Bilbo pictures on
Instagram in one week! Take a look at all the comments and tweets we
got, there is something for everyone to run with. Thank you all for making #votebilbo happen. I received several messages at the beginning saying I was ‘crazy’ and it was ‘Folly against Twi-hards,’ ‘Who cares about MTV,’ and ‘What’s the point of a stupid teenage online popularity contest?’ But this is why fans love being fans. Achieving something together. To Prove Their Quality.”

And that, my friends, is indeed the feeling I have at the end of the day. That we have stood up with a flag of unity once again. That we have proven our quality of thinking creatively and acting with great energy! It feels like it was months in the making but it happened over such a very short length of time (making it the more surprising).

The love that brings us together is our love of J.R.R. Tolkien and his works are evergreen. No separation of older to younger generations or access to technology can slant that.  The truth will out!

Hulk sad.  Too bad.

Batman gave up the ghost. Because we are the most.

Iron Man clad in shame. Shoulda played his own game.

Catwoman felt an itchy pox. Put kitty back in her smelly box.

Snow White drifted. Twi-hards were sifted (out).

But #BilbotheHero wins the day! We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Much too hasty,

Quickbeam

————————–
Follow Cliff “Quickbeam” Broadway on Twitter: @quickbeam2000

Follow TheOneRing.net on Twitter: @theoneringnet

single-bilboooo from Spiegel Ei on Vimeo.

Much too hasty,

Clifford “Quickbeam” Broadway

Follow Cliff on Twitter: @Quickbeam2000