Mark your calendars folks, this looks like a good one. From the mind of our own moderator Melian the Maia comes our next topic:
Female Characters and Tolkien’s Middle-earth
We will explore how Tolkien portrayed women/female characters in his world. There aren’t many, as compared to men. Some are incredibly strong, powerful and/or brave… Melian, Luthien, and Yavanna for example… but some, like Finduillas and Rian, are ineffectual. There are the rather stereotyped hobbit ladies we encounter, the stiff and ornery Lobelia and the yearning Rosie Cotton. And in another realm we have Arwen and Dis, characters who must have had great importance in every day life but of whom we read little.
How did Tolkien perceive his female characters? Did the times during which he wrote influence his portrayals, if at all? Might the role of women be greater if the works of Middle-earth were published today? Come on down to The Hall of Fire and share your thoughts, feelings, and insights with us. First timers always welcome!
Place: #thehalloffire on theonering.net server; come to theonering.net’s chat room Barliman’s and then type /join #thehalloffire .
Saturday Chat: 7:00 pm ET (19:00) [also 12:00 am Sunday (0:00) GMT and 9:00 am Sunday (09:00) AET]
Sunday Chat: 8:00 pm (20:00) AET [also 11:00 am (11:00) GMT and 6:00 am (06:00) ET]
Sunday Chat: 6:00 pm (18:00) GMT [also 1:00 pm (13:00) ET and 3:00 am (03:00) Monday morning AET]
ET = Eastern Time, the time on the USA’s east coast
GMT = Greenwich Mean Time, the time in Western Europe
AET = Australian Eastern Time, the time on Australia’s east coast
Questions? Topics? Send ‘em here.
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There’s a cool interview with the ever-articulate Cate Blanchett [Galadriel] in the New Zealand Herald. Mainly she talks about her latest movie ‘The Gift’ but she’s able to talk a little about the Rings too – and her feelings about the inevitable long-haired Galadriel dolls of the future. I hear ya, Cate. [More]
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We got a spy report about the Howard Shore soundtrack [More]
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A secret Ringer wrote in to say the film people came to the language school looking for people who could speak certain languages (More)
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The soundtrack is still being recorded in the next few weeks by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra – those rumours come from a few directions including the players, who know they have the time blocked out in their schedules for that gig. No more details than that have reached me.
More intriguing, somebody told me that there is a group of composers in Wellington called ‘Plan 9’ – mostly members of the group Six Volts – who is in some way involved with Shore and the score. My contact said that sometimes large film scores use a number of collaborators to fill out the details once the main themes and orchestration are set up by the ‘name’ composer. Not every Hollywood composer does this, and some do more than others. We didn’t have any information on how Shore works, but we had some speculation that the Plan 9 composers are involved with setting Tolkien’s songs to music.
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A secret Ringer wrote in to say that his university in Wellington was visited by the Rings. Techies were spotted in and around the School for European Languages. They were looking for Geman and Russian speakers. Students were recorded as they spoke whatever came into their head in those languages. For that they were given no script, but then they were asked to read “some sort of gobbledegook” into the microphones.
Our spy guesses that they were looking for people to make background noise – after all, they are recording the soundtrack around now, and the background to that might well require some sort of conversation in gutteral accents. Perhaps the Rohirrim or the Orcs?
That would have to be a frustrating job….you get a LOTR script and it’s in an unknown language!
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