The day-to-day operation of the website, and the events we host, require a lot more resources than when we first started nearly 15 years ago. We sometimes find it hard to ask our readers for the help we need to keep running, so we began discussing what it is that makes TheOneRing.net worth helping out. It started out as a search for the Top Ten Moments of TORn, but the list got so long because each staff member had their own idea of important moments in TORn history. Here, instead, is something more encompassing: Ten Ways TORn helps serve Tolkien and Lord of the Rings fandom (listed in no specific order).

And, if you enjoy what we do, consider a donation (no amount too small, because every bit does help!) to keep us running!

If you can’t, that’s fine as well — keep reading, commenting and contributing. Because TORn is as much you as it is us!

If you’ve ever sent in an article, submitted a photo or report, posted on our messageboards, visited our chat, or commented on our twitter, facebook or g+, you’re the reason TheOneRing.net is among the largest and most-respected pillars of the Tolkien community on the web.

• Spy Reports

• Spy reports were a big part of our content when the website first started. From casting announcements to secret location pictures to leaked images of important plot points, spy reports were our bread and butter stories. Some of the reports were from random, anonymous sources, while others were official leaks from cast and crew. In fact, there were many production members who said they used TheOneRing.net to keep track of what some of the other filming units were doing. Other spy reports were just someone stumbling upon a film location and sending in a story or images and then we’d all try and guess what location it actually was. Some of our biggest spy reports were of Arwen at Helm’s Deep (which subsequently didn’t happen), Saruman’s prone body on a spiky wheel (which did happen), and TheOneRing.net was given the honor of introducing Thorin to the world. And very soon, we will be seeing stories from MrCere’s visit to the set from his Production Embed last year.

• Hall of Fire Chats and the Message Boards

• Literary discussions on the message boards and Hall of Fire chats – From the very beginning of TheOneRing.net, discussions of the books, chapter by chapter, has been a hallmark. After all, while we waited for news on who would be cast, where filming would take place, and rumors of what might be cut out, we had the books to talk about. Discussions worked by talking about one chapter at a time, and luckily, there are enough books with enough chapters, to keep those discussions going on for a long while. Since the beginning, we’ve looped through the books several times, but luckily, there are always new readers joining the discussion, and new interpretations to be had. And for something a little more dynamic, there are the Hall of Fire chats in Barlimans. Sometimes the talk is about a specific chapter, or a certain character, and sometimes it is about current events, such as new character images or reviews of a recently released trailer. No matter which forum you use, there is always someone to talk to about some aspect of Tolkien, the books or our fandom.

• TORns Live Videos

• We began with TORn Live, which consisted of Red Carpet interviews at premieres, awards ceremonies and special events like Cannes 2001 and SDCC. These would be recorded, edited and released online a few days or weeks later. But technology now allows for live streaming interviews and vlogs and the like. Quickbeam hosts a weekly TORn Tuesday event with interviews and discussions, while he interacts with a live chatroom. The Happy Hobbit ladies record and post their vlogs and post them within a day or two of their recordings, for a much quicker turnaround on video content. And right now we have the Road to DragonCon in full swing with live streaming from across the country.

• Conventions

• Convention appearances – Calisuri and Quickbeam hosted a panel at San Diego Comic Con in 2001, before the release of FOTR, and since then barely a year has gone by that TORn hasn’t had a presence at at least one convention. At many of the conventions we appear at we also have a presence on the exhibit hall floor where we have sold some of our classic TORn shirts. We love it when we get up on stage for a panel and half the people in the audience are wearing some of our older shirts.

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  Baggins Birthday Party sign

  Line Parties and Fan Events

• Line Parties and other fan hosted events – TheOneRing.net has always been a grass roots type of fan-site and that is no more apparent then looking at the Line Parties of years past. Whether it is just a few friends, or some hundreds of people signing up on the website to attend, fans like you all over the world hosted Line Parties. A few even took place over several days, and included costume contests and trivia games for prizes. Other fan hosted events over the years have been the Hobbit Day/Baggins Birthday Bash events on Sept. 22, the Tolkien Toast on Jan. 3 and the Tolkien Reading Day on March 25. TORn staff in Los Angeles have been hosting a Baggins Birthday Bash party for 11 years now, but there are fan groups around the world that have hosted similar events. Smaller moots happen around the world all the time, there is a very active group in Wellington and one in Croatia. If you are hosting a fan event in the next year or two, please feel free to tell us about it.

• The Oscar Parties

• Originally conceived as a fan event to help raise funds to buy TORn a new server, who could have imagined the Cast and Crew actually showing up to the FOTR oscar party? Even more surprising, who could have imagined the ROTK sweep and all those Oscars on stage at a fan hosted party?

• O.R.C and E.L.F.

• TheOneRing.net hosted conventions – The One Ring Celebration on the West Coast (O.R.C.) and the Eastern Lord of the Rings Festival on the East Coast (E.L.F.) were co-productions with a professional convention company, but they definitely had a TORn stamp on them. The conventions allowed us to combine our love of the films by interacting with cast and crew with our love of the books through academic discussions, the art shows and costume displays. We really did break the mold on how a commercial scifi convention is run and hope everyone who attended had a blast.

• Academic essays and editorials

• TORn has long standing relationships with many in the academic community who have posted guest essays and editorials. Over the year several staffers have posted in depth analysis to fan questions on the site as well. In fact, we have a whole section on the ‘old TORn’ (pre-crash) called Green Books for academic posts. This section had so much good stuff in it, we published a book called “The People’s Guide to J.R.R. Tolkien” and a sequel book as well.

• Driving fan initiatives

• After Return of the King was done and Peter Jackson moved on to do King Kong, the fans waited to see what would happen with The Hobbit afterwards. Months turned to years and still no word while studios went bankrupt, copyrights issues got tangled up and various lawsuits were filed for missing payments. Finally, a few fans decided they had had enough and started a petition to ‘Make the Hobbit Happen’. They brought it to TORn and we got thousands of you to sign so that a big pile of names was delivered to TPTB. A similar thing happened when there was talk that the production would be moved out of New Zealand. The fans could see no where else as Middle-earth, so the ‘Keep the Hobbit in NZ’ campaign was born, but this time on Social Media. And most recently, there was an explosion of Tolkien fan love over the #Votebilbo twitter event prompted by an MTV Audience Award.

• TORn Community

• This list compiles many of the things that TheOneRing.net does to keep you informed, entertained and engaged, but there is really just one thing that makes TheOneRing.net so important to keep around. And that is the community of fans that convene on our message boards, in Barliman’s chat, on Facebook and Twitter.

This site was built by fans getting together to discuss what they hoped for from Peter Jackson long before FOTR ever saw the light of day. The fact that a long existing fan-base gathered here meant engaged and informed discussion began from day one, including analyzing all the spy reports about casting and location details. We didn’t have to wait for the release of the films, or for several episodes of a new show to take off before we could discuss the minutia of every detail because our fan base was already well established.

And what is ‘fandom’ if not a community of like minded people passionate about the same thing. Sure, everyone has their own opinions, so every time a new image was released, or a new trailer appeared, the message boards and chatroom erupted into heated discussions. But as the years wore on friendships were made, some turning into marriage, and we all began meeting up at various moots, conventions, concerts, premiere events, trips to New Zealand or just coffee and a movie. How many of you newer fans were galvanized by the #Votebilbo campaign and now have a wider array of Twitter friends because of it? The fact that TORn was able to continue to exist during all those lean years between film productions is due mostly to you, the readers, sticking around to discuss anything and everything to do with Tolkien, and sometimes other bits of pop culture. We know that after the release of The Hobbit: There and Back Again we will see another decline of readership, but we also know that the community is strong, the friendships have been forged and all of you take that fandom with you where ever you go next.

So again, if you are so inclined to help support us and keep the website going, please do make a pledge or bid on one of the many cool auction items we’ve been posting about the past few days. On behalf of the All Volunteer Staff at TheOneRing.net, you have our deepest gratitude for all the support over the years.

The films are a two-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” celebrating its 75th year of publication in 2012. Peter Jackson is directing the films after helming a three-part adaptation of Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” book that appeared in print 17 years after “The Hobbit.” Jackson scripted the films with his writing team of Phillipa Boyens and Fran Walsh with the addition of one-time-director Guillermo del Toro. Fans will remember the many agonizing delays before the film’s start that eventually forced del Toro to bow out.

Curtis, reporting from the film set, is part of TORn’s Senior Staff, a writer and photographer known to the TORn community at MrCere. He has contributed to TheOneRing.net for more than a decade in a variety of roles. In December he visited and toured New Zealand including an exclusive report from the Hobbiton Movie Set after being granted permission to publish impressions and photos from the site, rebuilt for “The Hobbit.” The location can be visited as a fully dressed film set accessible to by tour. The first block of filming on “The Hobbit,” included production from the site, set on a working livestock farm near Matamata, New Zealand.

TheOneRing.net is a not-for-profit website that serves as the hub for Tolkien communities online as well as the physical world. It was founded in 1999 by Erica Challis (Tehanu) in New Zealand, Canadian Mike Regina (Xoanon) and Wiliam Thomas (Corvar) and Chris Pirrotta (Calisuri) from the U.S.. The foursome’s website quickly vaulted to fame in an internet age when the relationship between fans and films and movie studios was rapidly evolving. The all-volunteer staff manages the site that includes a live chat room, message boards, news updates about all things related to Tolkien and the fan community world wide.

TORn will make a series of convention appearances including the San Diego Comic-Con, DragonCon in Atlanta and the New York Comic-Con. TheOneRing also used the internet to organize grass-roots fan parties around the world for the premiere of the LOTR films and anticipates doing so again. We also have a Wellington, New Zealand world premiere party planned with Red Carpet Tours and an Oscar Party set in Los Angeles in February.

TheOneRing.net and MrCere wish to thanks Warner Bros. and Wingnut for the invitation, including many individuals inside each organization, and for fans worldwide for their support. While only one representative can serve to communicate the stories and images from the set, we feel strongly that an invite to a fan site is a compliment to the work of many staffers and the whole of the fan community.

Follow us at Facebook and Twitter. Curtis will not be Tweeting from the set, but will be living and relating experiences in Wellington, New Zealand. He tweets from @MrLDC. And, hang on tight!

June 8

1961 – Letter to Rhona Beare (#230) – answers various questions about LOTR, such as the reasoning behind Aragorn’s declaration that he is “of the race of the West unmingled’, the meaning of various elvish phrases: “Mae govannen means ‘well met.’ Treebeard’s greeting to Galadriel and Celeborn (‘vanimar, vanimálion nostari!’) means ‘O beautiful ones, parents of beautiful children.’”, and the song of praise in the field of Cormallen.
2001 – The official LOTR website posts Cannes footage with intro by Peter Jackson

June 9

1941 – Letter to Michael Tolkien who was at the time an Officer Cadet at the Royal Military College in Sandhurst (#45) – relays his love and fears for his son in the time of war and empathizes with the German people whose virtues are “of obedience and patriotism are greater than ours in the mass. Whose brave men are just about as brave as ours. Whose industry is about 10 times greater. And who are – under the curse of God – now led by a man inspired by a mad, whirlwind, devil: a typhoon, a passion: that makes the poor old Kaiser look like an old woman knitting.”
2000 – original Woman’s Day photos of Sam & Frodo in Mordor are posted on TORn; Marvel (Toy Biz) is awarded toy license for Lord Of The Rings.
2002 – The official LOTR website posts pic of Peter Jackson, Barrie Osborne and the hobbits making their acceptance speech at the MTV Movie Awards
2003 – AICN reports scene shot of Elrond revealing himself to Aragorn in Theoden’s tent at Dunharrow (w/Hugo Waving’s Matrix gag)

June 10

1999 – Official site sneak preview ; Sir Ian McKellen wins Best Supporting Actor, FOTR wins Best Fantasy Film, and Peter Jackson wins Best Director at the 28th Annual Saturn Awards.

June 11

2000 – Robyn Malcolm revealed to have small role in LOTR (Morwen); The Crack of Doom cracks TORn up!
2006 – Fantasy/LOTR artist Tim Hildebrandt dies at age 67 from complications due to diabetes

June 12

2000 – a spy report on the filming at Lyall Bay (Dunharrow); first (crummy but still tantalizing) images of Bilbo and Hobbiton; Sir Ian McKellen posts 5 audio clips on his site, one of which is Gandalf saying, “One Ring to rule them all…”
2003 – The Science Museum in London announces its next exhibiton – The Lord of the Rings Motion Picture Trilogy – The Exhibition

June 13

1999 – Casting rumors: Bruce Willis petitions PJ for role the trilogy, and possible crew names (Nick Weir as props master, Jill Westwalker as assistant props master, Nick Riera as props buyer)
2004 – Winners of canadanthony’s TORNsib Awards announced (message board voting on LOTR favs)
2006 – Germany’s “Cinema” magazine readers pick “Lord of the Rings” trilogy as their #1 choice for Best Films of All Times.

June 14

1999 – The Sunday Star Times bandies names about: Keanu Reeves, Danny DeVito, and Anthony Hopkins for the role of Gandalf ; TORn scrapbook posts Woman’s Day pic of Peter Jackson inside Bag End
2004 – the latest ‘Fraud of the Rings’ by cartoonist John Cook

When I was down in Wellington last April I caught up with LOTR producer Barrie Osbourne, we was hard at work on his next film ‘The Water Horse’. I also had a chance to meet the director Jay Russell. At the time they were just about ready to begin shooting, this looks like they may be in re-shoot phase, the shoot in Scotland may or may not have happened yet, who knows. As you can see in the photos they seem to be planning something quite BIG to be on the blue screen…anyone who has read ‘The Water Horse’ already knows the answer to what that ‘something’ may be.

Take a look at the photos and what John has to say!

Click for more images

There are a few photos of WWII type patrol boats sitting at the entrance to Stone Street. Secondly, we walked around to the other end of the street where you can see the back end of blue screen (cargo container side). There are a few places along this street where it seems Weta has parked some things that are either not in use any more of about to be used. I included a few pictures of what looks like a giant fist and the back of a head. They’re sitting in an alley along with a couple catapults…obviously from LOTR. Also, in another space there are very new looking airplane parts which look unfinished and freshly made. There’s one photo of those in the bunch.

On the night of the 16th and 17th one of the major streets in town is going to be shut down for “filming”.

I got some news from the Jackson camp from a good friend who’s working onset on “King Kong”. I’m not sure if you’ve heard these before or not, but here goes:

1) Two words: Giant Spiders. Yes Peter Jackson has DEFINITELY shot the infamous Giant Spider segment that was cut from the original 1933 version of the movie. And not only Giant Spiders, but Giant Wetas as well!

2) Andy Serkis’s character – Lumpy – bites it in the Giant Spider sequence

3) Andy Serkis’s motion capture suit apparently has extended arms to give him a more gorilla effect AND he has a microphone that goes through an audio processor to make him roar like a gorilla to give the actors something to perform against!

4) Here’s the most interesting tidbit of all – there is a VERY STRONG rumour going around set that Peter Jackson’s next movie is going to be – A WORLD WAR I EPIC about the ANZACS! And that the Venture is going to be reconfigured into a WWI Minesweeper for the film!

After having watched the extended version, my favorite character became Denethor. His new scenes gave him such depth that I couldn’t help but wonder why in the world they had to cut them. We learn more about Denethor than about any other character, in my opinion, and that’s saying a lot. We learn new things about him not only from his extended and new scenes, but from Faramir, which I thought was a nice touch. Also, I must credit the actor who played Denethor for the coolest line in the whole trilogy: In this extended cut, when he learns that the first levels of the city are in flames and that the men are deserting them, he says something like ‘Why do the fools fly? They should stand and burn, for burn they must.’ Awesome. Oh, and he has a heated exchange of words with his son that stand out because it’s very dramatic. It even reintroduces Sean Bean as Borimir in a most unexpected way!

The House of Healing is back in as well, which is good, because it allows you to breath a little between the two big battles of the movie. Aragorn shows his healing skills, which allow us to realize that he IS really fitted to be king, and not just a wannabe. This new segment also has tender moments between Faramir and Eowyn while they’re recovering from their battle wounds, which serves a nice conclusion for both characters and allow the actors who play them to shine.

Of course you must have heard by now that Saruman has been reinserted into the movie, but let me tell you, you’re in for a treat! The sequence is over five minutes in lenght but I would have taken more…Saruman tries to rally Gandalf once again to his cause, but Gandalf doesn’t fall in the trap. Also, Gandalf finally gets the chance to establish himself as the ruling wizard of Middle earth, when he says something like ‘I am not Gandalf the Grey whom you betrayed, I am Gandalf the White and I cast you out of the order.’ From this point the sequence takes a dramatic turn and you’re on the edge of your seat until Saruman meets his fate. A sticky fate that turns him to dust!

A new character is introduced in the extended version: the Mouth of Sauron. He comes out of the black gate riding a huge black horse and basically he speaks for his master (who is after all a huge flaming eye!). The Mouth taunts the members of the fellowship and makes them believe Frodo has died after endless torture. He has particularly gruesome words for Aragorn.

What more can I say without dragging too long? The Paths of the Dead become Indiana Jones-like with new perils and booby-traps, there is a fight sequence with some pirates which was cool, because it shows you how Aragorn was able to take over the whole fleet of ships that bring him to Minas Tirith, Frodo and Sam’s journey becomes so much more dramatic and their trip across the burning lands of Mordor is extended a lot, there is a whole lot more to learn about the backstory of Minas Tirith, Aragorn confronts his archenemy Sauron in the flaming palantir and Gandalf even faces a new challenge when the mighty witch-king lands in front of him and confronts him (a sequence you must see before you die, it’s simply too cool).

Mazzic writes: I visited the New Starcon II in Tilburg, the Netherlands earlier today (www.newstarcon.com). The only Lord of the Rings actor was Lawrence Makoare himself who also appeared at FACTS in Belgium last week (www.facts-convention.com). Although quite a few other big names were scheduled to appear at this show, there weren’t a lot of visitors at all. So I didn’t have to wait very long to meet Lawrence again, as I also met him last week since I live in Belgium.

He is truly a nice lad who enjoys talking to his fans and giving information on his acting performances and costume experiences. After I got my autographs, the actors all went out for a short lunch break, so I had some time to check out the different LOTR items Lawrence brought to the NSCII.

That is when I discovered this picture where Gimli kills Gothmog. Is it going to be in the Extended ROTK Edition? I don’t know, it wasn’t in the trailer… So thought you guys may wanted to know this tidbit!