photo 3We have several great items up for auction to help keep this amazing site running allowing us to bring you all the comings and goings of what happens in Middle-earth.

I wanted to highlight a few of the items in this post so you could get a better look at just how cool these items are. The items I want to highlight for you are: The Boromir Exclusive Statue, Arwen Exclusive Statue, Nazgul Prototype Medallion, and the Thorin/Goblin King set from The Bridge Direct.

Continue reading “Collecting The Precious – Light The Beacons Auction”

Azog the Defiler
Azog the Defiler
In this TORn Library piece, Ringer Rud the Spud takes an in-depth look at Azog the Defiler, and how his presence played out in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

In particular, he examines whether persistent criticism of this key villain might be a result of flaws inadvertently introduced by the relatively late switch from two films to three.

Continue reading “Did Azog defile An Unexpected Journey?”

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.

gtg An eagle-eyed reader let us know the other day about a very cool-looking art print of Gandalf the Grey called A Journey in the Dark.

This art print, inspired by The Fellowship of the Ring, captures the moment when Gandalf is trying to recall the right direction through Moria. The artist, Madison Gregory, offers a range of art prints from different movie franchises. Fans can get this print in sizes ranging from 4.5″ x 10″ to 21″ x 42″ with prices between $100 and $400. Continue reading “Collecting The Precious – A Journey in the Dark Art Print”

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.

mbladeThe folks over at United Cutlery and BudK have a new item for fans of Middle-earth to pre-order. The new item available for pre-order is a replica of the Morgul Blade Radagast discovers during The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. You can order this awesome collectible for only $129 and it will be in-stock in just 60 days. So you won’t have to wait long before you add this to your collection. Also, if you’re feeling lucky you can enter into a contest and you just might bring this item home. The contest ends when the Morgul Blade ships in 60 days.

Morgul Blade Product Page and Contest!

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.”

[Read More]

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.