Celebriel reports, Well another Dragon*Con has ended, and Tolkien Track attendees are still busy this week editing photos, uploading videos, emailing new and old friends, and getting costumes and props cleaned and safely put away. Here are just some of the track highlights this year (not including Anne Petty’s Dragon Smackdown and TORn’s ‘The Hobbit’ DragonCon Presentation, which are covered separately).
Friday night: An Evening in Bree. This Friday party traditionally gets the weekend into high gear, with most attendees in their best Lord of the Rings finery eager to catch up with friends, enjoy the great bands (The Brobdingnagian Bards and Emerald Rose), and dance like hobbits at The Green Dragon.
This year there was no costume contest, and there was a scary medical emergency (which fortunately, we understand as of Sunday, the individual survived), but the ballroom was full and was even closed for crowd control for a time.
Saturday morning: The fourth annual parade through the streets of Atlanta featured a record number of participants and thousands of spectators. Middle Earth was again well represented. View CNN’s feature with parade footage here. Find video of the whole parade uploaded in sections on YouTube. The parade was followed by the LOTR/Arms of Middle Earth pizza lunch on the 10th floor of the Marriott.
Saturday morning: Tolkien Costuming. Michael Cook, Marcia Banach and Jules Kelly gave an excellent workshop on costume design, materials, and fabrication. Marcia and Jules detailed each layer of their elaborate new King of the Dead and Soldier of the Dead costumes (see photos), and Michael offered solid advice on leather and weaponry. Attendance was limited only because the official schedule listed their panel at 11:30PM rather than AM.
Other high points included talking to the delightful Peter Beagle in the Walk of Fame and hanging out at the TORn fan table in the Hilton, where the new Smaug Kills t-shirts were on sale, visitors picked up free Sideshow Collectibles gift cards, and fans inspected and signed the Help the Hobbit Happen petition (currently at over 62,000 signatures.) Track Director Jean Baughman and her staff once again did a great job planning the programming, keeping everything on schedule, decorating the track room, providing raffle prizes, and dispensing advice and support to attendees and presenters alike.
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Kristin Thompson, author of The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood, writes: I am going to be doing a signing event for The Frodo Franchise in New York on September 27. It starts at 7 pm at Barnes & Noble Upper West Side, 2289 Broadway at 82nd Street, tel. 212.362.8835. It should be an exciting evening, since Lord of the Rings co-producer Rick Porras will be joining me for a conversation before the signing! We’ll talk for perhaps half an hour and field questions for fifteen minutes or so.
Rick was one of my interviewees for The Frodo Franchise, and he provided a lot of fascinating information. As most TORN readers know, he was involved in the film in a wide variety of ways, including directing some scenes, helping to coordinate the videogame production, and touring visiting VIPs around the Wellington facilities. [More]
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Celebriel writes, Who better to talk about dragons at Dragon*Con than Tolkien scholar and author Anne Petty? Anne’s talk, “Glaurung vs Smaug: Dragon Smackdown,” helped kick off the Tolkien Track on Friday and was repeated on Sunday.
Anne reminded us that Tolkien called dragons “a potent creation of men’s imagination,” and she took us through the characteristics of dragons and dragon tales as classified in Finnish scholar Antti Aarne’s Tale Type Index, published in 1910 and now known as the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index after English translator and scholar Stith Thompson. These include:
- The hero fights a mythical dragon
- The dragon sleeps on treasure
- A human steals from the dragon’s horde
- The dragon guards a water source
- Dragon’s blood is poisonous
- Dragons’ eyes and their voices can cast spells
- Dragon’s blood gives magical properties
- Dragon’s have an exposed vulnerability (which the hero or an accomplice must discover)
Anne explained that Tolkien knew dragons from childhood, from stories in Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book, first published in 1890 and still in print, which included “The Story of Sigurt.” He visualized dragons as worms, long and skinny, and in length 20 feet or more, very different from the squat, bulky dragons known most commonly in the west from the St. George legend. She noted that the dragon in the Rankin-Bass animated “The Hobbit” of 1977 is fairly is close to Tolkien’s vision – an Eastern dragon not a Western one.
With this background, Anne developed the contrasts and comparisons between Glaurung and Smaug. Glaurung is a dragon of the First Age, the first of Morgoth’s great dragons. His name means “burning,” suggesting that he is a firedragon or uruloki.
Tolkien describes him as a “golden dragon of Morgoth,” “the father of dragons” and “the golden dragon of the god of hell.” In personality, Glaurung is impulsive and calculating in a human sort of way. Glaurung is relative young – we know this because in his early battles his platelike armor has not completely hardened. In “The Children of Hurin,” Turin kills Glauring by stabbing him from beneath. His vulnerability was ignoring or underestimating humans in his focus on the elves.
Smaug, also called a worm and a winged firedrake, is the last of the dragons. He doesn’t work for Sauron or Morgoth but is a free agent. He lives in under the Lonely Mountain (Erebor), which he took from the dwarves, and is red gold in color.
His name means “to squeeze through, like a snake through a hole.” Bilbo noticed Smaug’s vulnerable spot when the dragon was flattered into revealing his diamond waistcoat. A thrush overheard Bilbo telling the dwarves and relayed the information to Bard of Esgaroth, who shot Smaug with an arrow. Like Glaurung overlooking humans, Smaug erred in overlooking hobbits and focusing on his dwarf enemies.
Smaug’s descriptors, while impressive, are not as terrifying as First Age dragon Glaurung’s. He is known as “Smaug the tremendous,” “Smaug the mighty,” and Smaug “the unassessably wealthy.” Smaug is also, we might say, better socialized. It’s almost impossible to imagine a dragon like Glaurung in conversation with Bilbo in “Riddles in the Dark.”
At the end of Anne’s talk, fans discussed who might voice Smaug in any forthcoming production of “The Hobbit.” Among the suggestions were James Earl Jones, Sean Connery, John Rhys-Davies, and Jeremy Irons.
Read more at www.annepetty.com. Check out Anne’s books, especially The Dragons of Fantasy (2004), at the web site.
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James writes: Around 3 weeks ago, we announced that the Association of Model Engineers in Malta will be organizing its annual exhibition from the 8th till the 16th of September, with the main centre-piece being a massive Helm’s Deep Model. Finally, the day has come!
Today, the exhibition was opened and shall run for the entire week-end and the rest of next week until the 16th. The Helm’s Deep diorama measures 2.5metres by 2 metres by 3.25 metres (triangular). Highly detailed Uruk-hai, Men of Rohan and Elves have been placed to re-created the climactic battle as portrayed in the film. Here are some photos of the model itself.
As was said in the first announcement, apart from the Helm’s Deep diorama, a wide range of models (from Military to Science Fiction and Fantasy) are also being displayed. More photos shall be available soon, but in the meantime, check for updates on the AME website. [a-m-e.org]
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If you missed attending DragonCon, then you missed TheOneRing.net’s wrap-up of what is happening with the live-action film version of ‘The Hobbit.’ We’ve gone ahead and exported our presentation into a web format so you can take a look at what we showed the audience in Atlanta, GA last weekend. Please note, there is no commentary accompanying this presentation (which is semi-critical at times) and there are definitely some hiccups with how the presentation exported – but you’ll get the hang of it! If you would like to discuss the presentation with fellow Tolkien fans, jump on over to our brand new forums or online chat! [View the Presentation] [Discuss in our Forum] [Discuss in Java Chat]
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TheOneRing.net and dragonworld.tv present The KNIGHT QUEST Contest! Win 2 tickets to participate as an audience member in the first episode of our new medieval-combat based reality TV series! The Tournament will consist of our Masters of Horse, Lance, Bow, Sword and Shield entertaining you with a demonstration of the chivalric martial arts, and you will also get to meet the Cast of our reality series on the very first day they begin their Quest to become a Knight. [CLICK HERE TO ENTER]
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