Welcome to our collection of TORn’s hottest topics for the past week. If you’ve fallen behind on what’s happening on the Message Boards, here’s a great way to 
catch the highlights. Or if you’re new to TORn and want to enjoy some great conversations, just follow the links to some of our most popular discussions. Watch this space as every weekend we will spotlight the most popular buzz on TORn’s Message Boards. Everyone is welcome, so come on in and join in the fun! Continue reading “TORn Message Boards Weekly Roundup – March 4 2012”
Category: LotR Books
In the US, tournament frenzy hits every March with the onset of the NCAA’s Men’s Basketball March Madness tournament. We thought this year would be a good opportunity for the entire Tolkien community to participate in a special tournament of our own. So without further delay we are announcing the Middle-earth Madness Tournament! The goal is to settle, once and for all, which character is favored most by Tolkien fans worldwide. To start off the process, the staff at TheOneRing.net compiled a list of 46 finalists. We need to weed this list down to 32 total contestants. To do that, we are going to ask you to vote for up to three characters in the poll below. Voting will be open until Feb 29th at Noon ET. We will then compile the results and create our tournament bracket with seeding based on total votes. It should be noted, much like the men’s basketball tournament in, our Middle-earth Madness selection committee does reserve the right to adjust results a bit in the spirit of competition. (and like the men’s basketball committee, some of the decisions are sure to be controversial!!) So without further delay, let the voting begin!
Continue reading “Announcing The Middle-earth March Madness Tournament!”
Attention New York, and surrounding area, Ringers! The very impressive and wildly popular ‘One Man Lord of the Rings’ show is coming to the Midtown Theater in New York City, and we’ve got an exclusive discount available to TheOneRing.net visitors. Regular tickets sell for $79, but we are excited to offer you a chance to pick up tickets for only $30! ‘One Man Lord of the Rings,’ performed by Charlie Ross, will be at the Midtown Theater February 17 (7pm), 18(2pm, 8pm) and 19th (2pm, 8pm). We suggest you place your order asap, as all shows are expected to be very popular. Use coupon code 1RNG at checkout to secure your discount. [Order Tickets] (Want to know more about the show, check out the official website.)
Chemical Engineering student Emil Johansson has an amazing passion project he developed mapping out the genealogy of everybody in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Called the LOTR project, it provides a great big family tree for Tolkiendom. Its scope is amazing as is the effort and organization, although it is still a work in progress. We asked Johansson to tell us more about his project and this is what he had to say:
“I first read the Lord of the Rings when I was eleven years old, just in time for the first movie to come out. At that point it’s not fair to say I was passionate about it but rather that I found it a good way of escaping reality for a while. I was the kind of kid who lived a lot in my imagination.
The first family tree I made was probably six years ago and consisted of two huge papers, 1 by 1 meters. I quickly realized this was something I wanted to share, but my knowledge of the web was too poor to allow it. I was not until November last year that I decided to give it a try. Even though much of the research already had been done, programming the site and adding the characters into the database have taken a lot of time. Too much for me to want to think about it.
I still have a massive amount of work left before I’m finished and I will not give up until it is perfect.”
The site is a MUST VISIT.
Why did Bloomsbury U.K. eventually decide to offer “Harry Potter” books in disguised covers? Because people were ashamed to be seen reading about witches and wizards on the train. Fantasy had been made into a guilty pleasure, like pornography. It was immature, juvenile, escapist. As for all those Tolkien fans who liked to dress up as elves and orcs, the only explanation, spluttered Edmund Wilson in 1956, was that “Certain people . . . have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash.” This, Michael Saler remarks, “from a man who liked to be called ‘Bunny.’ ”
In “As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality,” a historical and cultural study of fiction fandom, Mr. Saler counterpunches vigorously against the whole edifice of literary snobbery. What he has to say is so self-evidently right that the fact he has to say it makes one wonder how the critical profession has managed, for so long, to cultivate such a large blind spot. His book should be essential reading in every graduate school of the humanities. But it’s much more fun than that recommendation suggests. More..
Texts from J.R.R. Tolkien and George Orwell have been removed from the public domain in the United States, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling this week.
On Wednesday, The Supreme Court upheld a 1994 law which gives copyright protection to body of foreign works that had previously been available for free in the public domain.
Google hoped that the high court would overturn the law. The Wall Street Journal has more: “Google Inc. was the leading company challenging the law, in an echo of the separate battle in Washington over an Internet piracy bill that pits Google against movie studios. The search company, which didn’t respond to a request for comment, said in court papers that the restored copyrights could affect more than a million books it has scanned through its Google Books Library Project.” More..