In just one week, the LA TORn staff will be hosting our annual Baggins Birthday Bash to help celebrate the shared birthday of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. In recent years, the tradition of Sept. 22 as ‘Hobbit Day’ has spread to Tolkien fan groups around the world, and there are a variety of ways to celebrate. Some cook up Hobbity feasts, others do readings from the books or movie viewing parties, while some focus on Tolkien inspired games, contests or costuming. Here in LA, we’ve combined all these events and more, then added some prizes and mathoms to create one of the signature Tolkien fan events in the area. It all comes down to good food, fine Fellowship and lots of geeky Tolkien fun for ALL ages, so please come on down and get ready to have fun. The party will start at Noon on Sunday, Sept. 22 in Griffith Park, but in a new location, so please read the directions listed in the Facebook Event page and to RSVP your attendance. This is a potluck event, so check the party description for a list of items being brought and items needed. If you are unable to see the Event page or don’t do Facebook, just email me at Garfeimao@theonering.net to RSVP and I’ll get you the appropriate directions.
Category: J.R.R. Tolkien
Another interesting thought-piece that I stumbled on in my Middle-earth wanderings across the internet. In this article, Tolkien scholar Michael Martinez tackles the eternally vexing question of textual fidelity and why he feels that the divergences between novel and film are beneficial. Continue reading “Why The Hobbit movie’s divergences are beneficial”
In this piece on his blog Midgardsmal, linguist David Salo writes about how he derived various Orkish dialects used in the Lord of the Rings films from his own extrapolations of Black Speech, and
about his thoughts on the approach Sauron might have taken in putting together Black Speech itself.
Continue reading “David Salo on Black Speech, orc dialects and the mind of Sauron”
This is an illustrated tale of the untried university graduate who brought new life to JRR Tolkien’s previous creations. Here lies a tale about a young rookie who was plucked from the wilderness to deliver an almighty task despite lacking in heavyweight stature.
Art student Jemima Catlin, an avid JRR Tolkien obsessive, was just 23 when her work fell into the lap of literary giants Harper Collins – and little did she know that she would go on to illustrate none other than her beloved epic, The Hobbit. Continue reading “Jemima Catlin, the newest illustrator of The Hobbit”
Yours truly has been ever-so-slowly getting through the newest Tolkien book The Fall of Arthur for the last month-and-a-half with a hope of at some point stringing together a few poor words on the subject.
I’ve also been reading other what others have had to say in the media. This piece, by Tolkien scholar John Garth, is a good place to start if you’re interested.
Early in The Fall of Arthur, long awaited by fans of J.R.R. Tolkien and now edited for publication by his son Christopher, an army rides to Mirkwood where they see in a storm above it, Ringwraith-like:
wan horsemen wild in windy clouds
grey and monstrous grimly riding
shadow-helmed to war, shapes disastrous.
But this isn’t Middle-earth: it is Europe on the brink of the Dark Ages, and the army is led by Arthur and Gawain. Mirkwood is simply the old name for Germany’s eastern forests, which Tolkien borrowed for the children’s story he was writing in the same period in the early 1930s, The Hobbit.
Tolkien was a writer of endless stories. And as with most of them, The Fall of Arthur is literally endless: unfinished. It’s been lying among his vast legacy of papers, almost unknown but for a paragraph in Humphrey Carpenter’s 1976 biography and a single reference in Tolkien’s published letters. Publication follows that of the more difficult The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún in 2009, which Christopher Tolkien probably elected to publish first because it was complete. Like Sigurd and Gudrún, The Fall of Arthur is in alliterative verse, a mode last fashionable in the 14th century.
In this piece over on io9, Gibbelins discusses why Tolkien knew exactly what he was doing when he was using the Eagles of Manwë. It’s a bit sweary at times, so if you’re put off by strong language this is probably not the article for you. Good, thoughtful writing though. Continue reading “Why yes, the Eagles are ‘the God from the Machine’”