IMG_5162As many of you may know when we did our magazine for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey we took submissions from collectors around the world. A few of these ended up appearing in the magazine allowing people all over the world to see some of what you’ve taken time show off your love for Middle-earth. Recently, I was able to finally able to set up my collection and be able to really appreciate many of the pieces I’ve managed to add. Thankfully the room my stuff in now is large enough to show off everything I’ve got with room to spare for new items from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Even if I’m still getting items out of storage to show off. This collection through ups and downs (selling items) started back in 2003 and continues on for a while. It’s my way of allowing people see what Middle-earth means to me and explain why they’re missing out on such a great universe. I hope you enjoy taking a peek into my collection and what it looks like after its been reviewed.

WIBPSOM-IMDB-scatter Mark Lee at Overthinking It follows up his Words in Books per Second of Movie analysis of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and other successful movies with some additional analysis examining IMDB ratings, plus the trend in adaptations over the decades.


In last week’s article, I started with a simple question: how do book lengths, as measures by word count, compare to their adapted movie run times, as measured by seconds? I was mostly looking for a statistical basis to express my displeasure at The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (and by extension, parts 2 and 3 of this unnecessary trilogy), but I wound up comparing the density of the Hobbit movies, as measured in Words in Book per Second of Movie (WIBPSOM), to other prominent movie adaptations of books: The Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, and the Twilight franchises.

The findings were interesting in and of themselves (TL;DR: The Hobbit Books have way smaller WIBPSOM values than the other franchises), but they begged for a larger scale analysis, both in size of dataset and scope of inquiry. To address the size of the dataset, I found all of the (English language) entries on this list of best-selling books that have theatrically-released, non-silent movie adaptations. After including multiple movie adaptations of the same movie and excluding movies where I couldn’t find any data on book length as measured by word count, I came up with a dataset of 59 movie adaptations of best selling books.

As for scope of inquiry, well, let’s get down to brass tacks: is there any relationship between the density of a book’s movie adaptation, as measured by WIBPSOM, and the quality of the movie, as measured by its IMDB rating?

In a word, the answer to this intriguing question is an emphatic “no.”

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If you have a Tolkien/Middle-earth inspired poem you’d like to share, then send it to poetry@theonering.net. One poem per person may be submitted each month. Please make sure to proofread your work before sending it in. TheOneRing.net is not responsible for poems posting with spelling or grammatical errors.

Barliman's Chat A couple weekends ago The Hall of Fire followed up a discussion of heroism in The Lord of the Rings with one focusing simply on the aspects of heroism that members of the Fellowship exhibit during the Quest. For those who couldn’t attend, here’s a log.

Also, this coming weekend (Saturday August 17 at 6pm EDT (New York time)) we’ll be focusing on a movie topic — Beorn. That’s right, the shapeshifter of the Vales of the Anduin and hero of the Battle of the Five Armies. What do you think of Mikael Persbrandt, what are your thoughts on Beorn’s demense and hall so far, and what do you think of the spy image that we revealed last Friday? Those are just a few of the questions we’ll touch on, so don’t miss it! Continue reading “Hall of Fire chat log: aspects of heroism in the Fellowship”

If you have a Tolkien/Middle-earth inspired poem you’d like to share, then send it to poetry@theonering.net. One poem per person may be submitted each month. Please make sure to proofread your work before sending it in. TheOneRing.net is not responsible for poems posting with spelling or grammatical errors.

TheOneRing.net with Galatia Films offer this exclusive interview with the Lord of the Rings and Indiana Jones actor John Rhys-Davies. Learn about what inspires him to work as an actor. He talks about how it felt to be wearing all the wardrobe and battle axes for the fight scenes, his view on the Dwarves and his love for the films. The original interview was done for Galatia’s Live Reclaiming the Blade Day. Check out its Kickstarter page for more details and the full interview and of course you can also support its Kickstarter campaign for a new film that will feature The Hobbit swords and Narnia actors Ben Barnes (Prince Caspian) and William Moseley (Chronicles of Narnia).

John Rhys-Davies is Welsh and a screen actor and voice actor. He is perhaps best known for playing the dwarf Gimli and Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the charismatic Arab excavator Sallah in the Indiana Jones films. He also played Agent Michael Malone in the 1993 remake of the 1950s television series The Untouchables, Pilot Vasco Rodrigues in the mini-series Shōgun, Professor Maximillian Arturo in Sliders, King Richard I in Robin of Sherwood, General Leonid Pushkin in the James Bond film The Living Daylights, and Macro in I, Claudius. Additionally, he provided the voices of Cassim in Disney’s Aladdin and the King of Thieves.

Barliman's Chat Last weekend in The Hall of Fire, we discussed sources of heroism in The Lord of the Rings. Who acts heroically, and what is it that makes them heroic anyway? For those who couldn’t attend, here’s a log.

And a reminder, next weekend (Saturday August 3 at 6pm EDT (New York time)) we’ll be discussing the next chapter in our read-through of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: Book III, Chapter XI: The Palantir. It’s the final chapter of Book III, so don’t miss it! Continue reading “Hall of Fire chat log: the hero and the heroic in The Lord of the Rings”

If you have a Tolkien/Middle-earth inspired poem you’d like to share, then send it to poetry@theonering.net. One poem per person may be submitted each month. Please make sure to proofread your work before sending it in. TheOneRing.net is not responsible for poems posting with spelling or grammatical errors.

The key players in The Lord of the Rings are probably some of the most-written about characters in literature. Everyone loves the leading lights such as Frodo, Aragorn, Sam and Gandalf.

Yet there are a number of minor (some even without a name!) characters who either serve an important purpose, give us a great deal of food for thought, or even go against established yet hard-to-overcome stereotypes about the content of Tolkien’s writing.

In no particular order, here are my leading six. Continue reading “Six overlooked yet important characters from The Lord of the Rings”

If you have a Tolkien/Middle-earth inspired poem you’d like to share, then send it to poetry@theonering.net. One poem per person may be submitted each month. Please make sure to proofread your work before sending it in. TheOneRing.net is not responsible for poems posting with spelling or grammatical errors.