Lake-town LuauTORn is looking to host another Laketown Luau during San Diego Comic Con in July. In fact, we may well make this an annual event so that Tolkien fans can stay connected at one of the biggest Pop Culture events in the world. But we’d like to ask you, the readers, if this is something that would really interest you.

The Laketown Luau is a mashup event with both a Tolkien theme and a Luau theme mixed together, resulting in costumed hula contests, Pin the Black Arrow on the Dragon games and lots of fun and fellowship. The advantage of holding the event during San Diego Comic Con is that Tolkien fans attending the convention from all over the world will be in town that week and can attend. Even better, holding the event off-site means that non-attendee fans from So Cal can also attend the party.

Continue reading “Will you be at San Diego Comic con? Do you want go to a TORn party?”

hc3articlelogo_en HobbitCon 3 took place just a couple weeks ago in Germany and our friends at Henneth-Annun were on-hand to get the low-down.

They’ve compiled an extensive English-language report on the three-day convention, as well as many quotes from Q&A panels featuring Luke Evans, Graham McTavish, Sylvester McCoy, Lawrence Makaore, John Bell and more.

Don’t forget to click the link at the bottom to read the complete report.

Enjoy!

HobbitCon 3: third time’s a charm!

by Peter “TheHutt” Klassen

I do remember the very first HobbitCon. When FedCon GmbH, the organizing company, announced a new convention during the RingCon 2012 dedicated exclusively to “The Hobbit”, with the participation of 11 dwarves from Thorin’s Company (although two of them cancelled later), I didn’t know what to think about it. That was even before the first movie from PJ’s second trilogy was released, and the dwarf actors were only known to us from the director’s video blogs. And in fact, the first HobbitCon proved to be a commercial failure, though it had a very pleasant and homely atmosphere.

IMG_1549 Luckily, the organizers didn’t give up, and the second HobbitCon fared much better than the first one. And now, after the third HobbitCon (christened by Mark Ferguson “HobbitCon DREI”, which is German for “three”) has passed, you can really tell that there was barely room to swing a cat. If the first HobbitCon had just 800 visitors during the weekend, the third one had 5500 guests from over 27 countries! The Maritim hotel in Bonn was bursting, and the amount of Fili & Kili cosplay couples was staggering.

Speaking objectively, the HobbitCon is a unique event in the whole world. International conventions usually work with several mixed genres, there are many different fandoms present at a convention, with each fandom represented by just one or two actors. These are giant commercial vehicles, with an airplane hangar-like atmosphere. The HobbitCon is very different. You do not need to stay in a line overnight to get into a Q&A panel hall. You can be partying in a bar and suddenly find yourself on the dance floor together with Graham McTavish, Jed Brophy or even Luke Evans. Of course it is not for free – but still, three days of positive emotions, homely atmosphere and the feeling that the movie actors have become your friends, are worth it.

[Read More]

Martin FreemanAfter hitting so many different parts of popular culture, Martin Freeman, forever known around these parts as Bilbo Baggins, will now invade the Marvel Universe, which also means Disney. Just in case he wasn’t popular enough for works in Middle-earth and in the world of Sherlock Holmes, he will jump into Marvel’s “Captain America: Civil War.”

Marvel made the announcement on its website. Continue reading “Martin Freeman signs on for Marvel’s ‘Civil War’”

Ringer TheHutt, editor of the Russian LotR and Hobbit site Henneth-Annun, laid his hands on this exclusive German release of “The Hobbit” trilogy. Not only are all three of the movies included in steelbook packaging, but there is also a bonus inclusion: “Bilbo’s Journal”, a notebook in the style of Bilbo’s diary which eventually became the Red Book of Westmarch.

Continue reading “The Hobbit Blu-Ray Trilogy with Bilbo’s Journal”

hobbitoina2This past week has brought us another of Thorin’s company from our friends at Weta Workshop.  This time we get our dear old Oin the Dwarf holding his hearing aid trying to figure out what’s being said in the heat of battle.

Oin comes in with a price tag of price tag of $249 and an edition size of only 1000 pieces worldwide. Oin is an in-stock purchase ready to ship once you place your order.