Tony writes: I thought this might be of interest. Fascinating how first hobbits and now gold rings of invisibility are now scientific realities. Check out this article called ‘Gold rings create first true invisibility cloak’.
Category: LotR Books
Andy writes: My name is Andy and I’m currently studying at a business academy in Germany. In the course of the last couple months, we were to work out a report dealing with some financial matters. I wrote my report on THE LORD OF THE RINGS IN COMPARISON TO OTHER GREAT MOVIE TRILOGIES OF OUR TIME, dealing with gross and production budgets. I was originally written in German but you can find a translation unter the button “English Report” on the right hand side of the homepage of my site.
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 (MAP), 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.
Henry Gee, the author of The Science of Middle-earth (which began life here on Green Books) has taken over the editor’s chair at Mallorn, the Journal of the Tolkien Society. Mallorn is usually published annually and takes reviews, fiction, criticism and artwork of interest to Tolkien aficionadoes. But Henry wants to ramp up the journal’s visibility, with a new design, more frequent publication and a change of focus. “Tom Shippey wrote that Tolkien was the Author of the (20th) Century”, says Henry. “But that was then, and Mallorn will be there to chart Tolkien’s evolving influence into the 21st”. He can be reached at mallorn@tolkiensociety.org
There is magic in the last line of The Lord of the Rings. To recap: the stolidly courageous Sam Gamgee, having watched his best friend, Frodo Baggins, sail towards the Grey Havens and into a kind of death, is left to walk back to the Shire where he finds his wife and children waiting with the promise of a quiet life far from the slaughter of the War of the Ring. J. R. R. Tolkien finishes with the sentence: “‘Well, I’m back,’ he said”. It is a touchingly understated conclusion which returns the prose to the homely simplicity of the inaugural chapters after the archaic epic mode of The Return of the King. However, as Diana Pavlac Glyer tells us in her scholarly and perceptive study The Company They Keep, this is not how Tolkien originally intended to finish his trilogy. He had in mind a further epilogue, set sixteen years after the events of the rest of the book, which would have provided another, superfluous glimpse into Gamgee’s domesticity. In this ultimately excised version, a grey-haired Sam reads stories of his adventures to his children, spinning them tales of wizards and orcs and walking trees. There is even the faint suggestion that Sam has been narrating the story of The Lord of the Rings itself, before, at last, we depart the Shire for good, leaving Sam and Rose in a state of connubial bliss, tale-telling by the fireside.
TORN Staffer Ostadan writes: The Esperanto translation of The Lord of the Rings (translated by William Auld) has been out of print for several years. I was recently pleased to learn that it will be reprinted this year, with some material not translated for the first edition (but, alas, still lacking the Appendices). You can get a taste of the translation at here; the site includes the Riddles in the Dark chapter from The Hobbit (Enigmoj en la Mallumo) which was reprinted in 2005, and two chapters (so far) from Lord of the Rings (La Ombro de la pasinteco, and La Spegulo de Galadriela), with four more to come over the next few weeks; one translated chapter from each of the six books of LotR will appear on the site. Since people have the original English at their fingertips (if not actually memorized), these translated excerpts may prove interesting as a curiosity even to those who cannot easily read Esperanto.