Thanks to Amazon’s France website, we now have the track list for Howard Shore’s score for the third and final Hobbit film The Battle of the Five Armies. We don’t yet know which of the tracks will be extended on the Special Edition Album, but there are definitely two bonus tracks at the end of disc two, as well as some reordering of the final tracks. Continue reading “‘The Battle of the Five Armies’ Soundtrack Album track list revealed!”
Category: J.R.R. Tolkien
We know many of our readers consider the Extended Edition of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth movies the definitive editions, but what many of our staff really love are the extras on the home editions. Filmmaker Michael Pellerin is the architect and creative force behind the features that give us insight into the movie-making team and experience. In fact his team’s work is absolutely essential viewing.
So, TheOneRing.net is pleased to share with viewers, courtesy of Warner Bros., an exclusive teaser from the edition. This short clip (and please watch it in full screen in HD) is from The Appendices Part IX, from a featurette called “Barrels Out of Bond: The Elven Sluice”. Continue reading “Exclusive teaser video from ‘Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’ Extended Edition”
It’s the stuff that fuels never-ending internet arguments: would X beat Y?
In a long interview with 92 Y, George R.R. Martin revealed that a reader had asked him that exact question about Daenerys’ dragon, Drogon, versus Smaug. And, refreshingly, Martin conceded that Smaug would win… Continue reading “George R.R. Martin says Daenerys’ dragons wouldn’t beat Smaug”
Over at The Guardian, Sarah Crown discusses why she rates Sauron in The Lord of the Rings as the most frightening and enduring villain of all literature.
I think there could be something to this. I recall vividly just how much Sauron’s unseen — yet uncannily tangible — menace frightened me as a teenager reading The Fellowship of the Ring late into the night, especially whenever I reached the following passage from The Mirror of Galadriel.
But suddenly the Mirror went altogether dark, as dark as if a hole had opened in the world of sight, and Frodo looked into emptiness. In the black abyss there appeared a single Eye that slowly grew. until it filled nearly all the Mirror. So terrible was it that Frodo stood rooted, unable to cry out or to withdraw his gaze. The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing.
Then the Eye began to rove, searching this way and that; and Frodo knew with certainty and horror that among the many things that it sought he himself was one.
Continue reading “Sauron: literature’s baddest of all baddies?”
Tolkien scholar and writer John Garth writes to tell us of a video documenting the sad end of a giant Black Pine (Pinus nigra) at the University of Oxford Botanic Gardens that J.R.R. Tolkien was known to have loved. Continue reading “A giant falls: Tolkien’s tree”
In our latest Library piece, TORn feature writer Tedoras delves deep into J.R.R. Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth to examine what we really know about Thranduil, the Sindarin lord of Mirkwood — a realm largely populated by Silvan elves. How does this make him different? What were the big influences in his political vision for his people? What, in essence, makes him tick?
It’s good stuff, and inadvertently, it’s almost a companion piece to my own musings on Thranduil’s strongest character traits from earlier this year.