The 4th annual Middle Earth Beer Festival, located in Hurst Green, Lancashire UK looks to be a Hobbit’s dream, with an extensive range of beers and ciders (including Completely Legolas, a traditional English ale, and Ent Draught, a ruby red bitter), local food, and live music.

Professor Tolkien was a frequent visitor to Hurst Green, and the surrounding countryside is thought to be the inspiration for many locations in ‘The Lord of the Rings’, most notably the Shire.

The Middle Earth Beer Festival 2012 runs April 12th – 15th, at Hurst Green Memorial Hall. More information and tickets can be found on the festival website: MiddleearthBeerFestival.co.uk

Saturday night via email Gentle Giant announced the first bust from The Hobbit if you sign up for their 2012 Premier Guild Memberships next week. The first character to be made into bust form will be the Dwarf Dwalin who joined Bilbo on the journey to the Lonely Mountain. The PGM program from Gentle Giant runs $60 and has many great things about it that allow collectors to get first cracks at must have items. So stay tuned to next week to get your PGM membership and a chance to add a Dwalin bust to your collection.

TheOneRing.net, along with 150 of our closest friends from the media and collector world, were granted access to a special Collector’s Party today at the International Toy Fare. Taking place at the Javits Center in New York City, this event showcased the entire 2012 line-up for LEGO, including their newly announced Marvel, DC and, of course, Lord of the Rings licenses. All we can tell you is…prepare for a hit on your bank account. Not because of cost, but simply because of the depth and breadth of the collection for Tolkien fans. Even more exciting…The Hobbit LEGOs have yet to be revealed!! Since we are reporting from NYC with limited time, I’m attaching the LEGO gallery below, and leaving you with some quick info. I’ll post a full report on each set later this week.

  • The Battle of Helm’s Deep and Attach at Weatherop sets mark the first time LEGO has created an articulated horse!
  • These sets will start hitting stores in June 2012
  • Hobbit sets/info will start hitting in the Fall with expected release of Nov/Dec 2012
  • Shelob Attacks is the first spider LEGO to feature a web function.
View the gallery after the break!

Continue reading “Lord of the Rings LEGO Revealed at Toy Fare 2012 at Collector’s Party”

If you’re like me, you feel geeky excitement every time a new Hobbit filming location is announced or leaked. If the studios haven’t announced what’s being filmed there, it’s great fun to try to guess. If it’s already known what’s being filmed at a certain location (Hobbiton in Matamata is a pretty obvious example), it’s still fun to envision how scenes from “The Hobbit” will look there and/or try to spot new details in the locations and sets that weren’t there for the Lord of the Rings movies. Message board member ceppault has now made it ultra-easy for all of us to track the filming locations and visit them virtually with him via his Hobbit Production Locations version of Google maps. ceppault has also included quotes about the locations from articles and/or spy reports that add interesting details to the ‘pins’ on the map.

Thanks go to ceppault for sharing with us and allowing us to share it with you. If you’d like to help add to the locations, give ceppault your feed back it the active thread on our Hobbit Movie discussion board.