“The Hobbit,” has to be cast but that just leaves more time for fans to speculate, guess and suggest regarding the casting of the two-films planned by producer Peter Jackson and director Guillermo del Toro.
There are a few givens. According to the decision makers, as many of the main characters that appear in both Jackson’s LOTR trilogy and GDT’s Hobbit films will be cast using existing actors from those roles as possible. And while media outlets trying to create news about the film have asked any actor they can find if they will appear, the list of sure crossovers are relatively small.
Ian Holm, approaching 80 years old, has stated that he is too old to play Bilbo because of the physical demands of the role and the required relocation to New Zealand. So the search for the main character is on. Most readers will be familiar with characters like Gandalf that belong to actors such as Ian McKellen so they will not be rehashed here because there is no debate about who will fill the role.
Read inside to find lists of names with links to help fans become familiar with many of the offered suggestions. Continue reading “Casting ‘The Hobbit,’ via TORn’s message boards”
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The folks from Crescent Moon Publishing send along word of two Tolkien books available on Amazon.com. Take a look at Tolkien’s Heroic Quest (Paperback) and J.R.R. Tolkien: The Books, The Films, The Whole Cultural Phenomenon, Including a Scene By Scene Analysis of the 2001-2003 Lord of the Rings Films (Paperback). Continue reading “New Tolkien Books from Crescent Moon Publishing”
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From Entertainment Weekly: When the news came down yesterday that a heretofore unpublished book by J.R.R. Tolkien will be hitting bookstores in May, I was a little surprised that I, an avowed Tolkien dilettante, felt a genuine twinge of excitement. Although I have never read Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, I did love me Peter Jackson’s LOTR moving pictures something fierce, and I’m quite twitterpated to see what director Guillermo Del Toro and exec producer Jackson have cooking for The Hobbit. Maybe this new Tolkien story — which the good professor reportedly wrote before spinning his tales of furry-footed Hobbits and ring-seeking dark lords — would prove just as richly filled with fodder for a sweeping fantasy epic that wins oodles of Oscars. EW.com
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Last night I was watching ‘The Antiques Roadshow’, a long-running TV programme on the BBC in the UK. It involves members of the public bringing antiques and so on to show to experts, in order to get more information about them, and a valuation. Those of you in the UK can see the programme on the BBC’s iPlayer for the next five or six days, here.The interesting bit is about 35 minutes 45 seconds into the programme. For those of you who can’t view iPlayer, I’ll give you a rundown. A lady had brought in her copy of ‘The Hobbit’, a first edition from 1937. In about 1940-41, she had lent the book to a friend. She forgot who she’d lent it to, and her friend forgot who she’d borrowed if from, presumably not thinking to look inside the fly-leaf, where the owner’s name was written. Continue reading “TV Watch: Hobbit on ‘The Antiques Roadshow’”
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J.R.R. Tolkien scholar Douglas A. Anderson will present “Annotating The Hobbit & Other Adventures” at Bradley University’s Neumiller Chapel in Bradley Hall at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 17, in Peoria, Illinois. Anderson is the award-winning author and editor of The Annotated Hobbit, Tales Before Tolkien, Tales Before Narnia, Seekers of Dreams, and, with Verlyn Flieger, an expanded critical edition of Tolkien’s On Fairy-stories. He is also an editor of the academic journal Tolkien Studies.
Bradley adjunct and former Illinois Central College English professor Mike Foster will be the moderator of the free lecture. Foster has been the North American representative of the Tolkien Society since 1995. From 1974 until his retirement in 2005, he taught a literature course on Tolkien and another on fantasy literature at Illinois Central College. In 2006 and 2008, he taught an upper-division version of that class at Bradley University. The lecture is sponsored by the Cullom-Davis Library Speakers Committee in conjunction with The Friends of the Library Committee. Read More
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Joe writes: I wonder if you guys have seen my blog. I’m building a hobbit-hole in my backyard as a playhouse for my kids and a hill for them to play on. I would be honored if you would take a look. It is a work in progress which I hope to have finished in time for the release of the new movie of The Hobbit. http://myhobbit-hole.blogspot.com
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