Check out these scan from ‘Metro’ with an exclusive look at Stephen Sinclair.

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Quickbeam and I had a chance to attend the Storyoplis/Sean Astin event in Los Angeles yesterday.

The event began with a presentation of the 15 minutes of behind the scene footage from the JVC LOTR DVD. Heard of it before? Yep, it is the same DVD available with the purchase of the JVC “Lord of the Rings” DVD Player. The crowd of approximately 100 or so raving Tolkien fans loved it.

Claire Cooper then introduced the star of the show, Sean Astin. (Sam Gamgee in the film, if you have been hiding under a rock for the last few years) Sean answered fan questions for a good 45 minutes and then signed posters and books. The highlight of Sean’s talk was something that seemed to surprise even him! Claire brought out a clothing rack of his Lord of the Rings costumes as well as his sword used for the films. Both the full sized and scale model versions of his outfit and weaponry were there for fans to see. (Some even got to try them on! See the gallery below)

Claire than introduced Jude Fisher, the author of “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Visual Companion.” She spoke a bit about her experience writing the book and how excited she was with the final product from Peter Jackson and company. Jude also sat down with fans to sign copies of the book.

After both Jude and Sean had finished speaking, and while fans were lining up to get autographs, the folks at New Line allowed fans to touch and feel the props. And boy they did that! Some got to try on the costumes while others just marvelled at the craft and quality of props like Boromir’s Horn!!!

We’d like to thank New Line and Storyopolis for this great event, and hopefully they can do more events like this across the country for fans everywhere.

We met a lot of great people at the event and we’d like to mention them real quickly now. You will see many of them in the pictures below.

•Derek LeLash (the one that informed us of the event!)
•David Baxter (pictured below, he is the VERY tall gentleman getting something signed by Sean Astin)
•William ( Pictured below, Will inspired a group of people to read Tolkien, and in the process created one of the best group of fans in the area. The next five fans listed here are just a few of the people he has influenced. )
•Ivan (Pictured below, he’s the one with the Radiohead ticket signed by Elijah Wood)
•Diana (Pictured below, she tried on the hobbit outfit )
•Dennise (Pictured below tried to skewer Ivan with Sam’s sword and also readily admits to having the Lord of the Rings cliff notes!)
•David (Pictured below, he was lucky enough to wear the hobbit outfit AND wield Boromir’s Horn!)

If we missed your name, we apologize! Especially those of you who won prizes in the raffle.

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From: Faramir

We just got our December issue of our PBS magazine – for the TV station WHYY (out of Philadelphia, PA). They will be showing a special on Tolkien which will contain archival radio and film recordings of Tolkien himself. This will take place on Sunday, December 23 at 9PM Eastern Time. It has been my experience that with things like this that they tend to run them on most of the stations across the nation. If you go to www.pbs.org and click on Station Finder, you can find a local station to tape it off of.

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Noggin the Nog writes: Thought you might be interested in this interview with Billy Boyd from todaysNewcastle Journal (UK). There is an amusing account of how he first met Orlando Bloom at Heathrow Airport as he flew out to New Zealand for the first time.

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From: Rebus

Just to talk more about the Cd you get free with the Mail On Sunday, it really is full of lotr stuff and very good, if you can get your hands on it, it would be a great thing to have (until the real thing comes out of course).

Here’s what the Cd has:

-Behind the Scenes footage with cast interviews and mini-documentaries on the origins of the filming, with comments by the director.

-All three trailers

-You can listen to ‘Concerning Hobbits’ by Howard Shore (if you haven’t got the soundtrack already)

-You can listen to a version of ‘Council Of Elrond’

-There are two screensavers

-There are two wallpapers

-A Prize draw to win 12 days in NZ

THE BEHIND THE SCENES FOOTAGE:

There are two documentaries and one film of just clips from the movie, rather like an more extensive 2nd teaser trailer.

-Finding Hobbiton

The first documentary is called ‘Finding Hobbiton’ where it shows the crew looking and finding where they will film these scenes, which they did in Hamilton. They talk to PJ about the location and the scenary artists who you see sitting and drawing how they will change this marshy farming land into the home of the hobbits, including the mill, and the green dragon. The farmer who owns the land is even interviewed! We even hear of some of the crew saying how everything there is real, they planted vegetables and hedges etc. there a year before filming so that it would all look genuine.

-Hobbiton Comes Alive

Here we see Hobbiton when it’s finished, there are lots of little clips that aren’t in any trailers like Sam and Frodo walking through a field talking and a large Horse-drawn cart ridden by Gandalf walking past a gate in a hedge and then Frodo jumping off it into the field and saying something like “see you later Gandalf!” We also see Frodo pushing Sam into a girl during Bilbo’s birthday bash and the girl grabbing the embarressed Sam and dragging him off to dance, it’s pretty obvious who she is, is it not?

There are also interviews with Billy Boyd, Elijah Wood, Dominic Monaghan, and Sean Austin talking about what they thought of Hobbition, Sean saying how it looked exactly how he pictured it. We also hear Ian McKellen saying how it was a magical place to be in and really felt as though you were living inside a myth.

-Unique Clip Montage (very much like the 2nd teaser trailer)

This basically has loads of clips of the movie with clips of the stars (them being Liv Tyler, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, John Rhys-davies, and Pj of course).
You see the clips of sauron wearing the ring, the ring lying at the bottom of water before Deagol found it, the balrog fighting Gandalf as he says “you shall not pass!” and the fire ripping through Bree(?), Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli all declaring their weapons to the fellowship, the gate opening to Moria, and Pippin dropping first thehead then the rest of the skeleton into the well in Moria.

-TRAILERS (3)

The General release Trailer

The 1st teaser Trailer

The 2nd teaser Trailer

-THE SCREENSAVERS

‘Beyond the Shire’ Screensaver
‘Hobbiton’ Screensaver

-WALLPAPERS

-Big picture of the black riders riding across river ( you all know the one) with a small ‘lotr’ logo

-A very misty picture showing the men of Roah surrounded by mist with a very large ‘lotr’ in the centre

And that’s your lot, as you can see a very packed Cd and as Strider said well worth a buy.

But that’s not all, there is a 16 PAGE SEGMENT!!! on lotr, it’s scenes, makeup, and the origins of Tolkien and his life in the TV guide to the mail on sunday, with pictures of all the locations, BREE, EDORAS, KHAZAD-DUM, LOTHLORIEN, WEATHERTOP, RIVENDELL, MORDOR, THE MISTY MOUNTAINS, and the RIVER ANDUIN (with a big map of middle-earth as a centre piece to the double page of pictures (it’s the map that’s on the soundtrack under-cd cover)).

By the time I’ll have got through it all it’ll be time to go to the cinema.

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A popular British magazine recently surveyed its readers to get their votes for the best book of all time. Thousands responded. The landslide winner for the top spot in history: The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien. The literary elites were incensed and amazed. How could a fantasy writer win? They re-polled the country, and again Tolkien’s work blew away the competition. Again they asked the public, and for a third straight time the public was very clear, Tolkien was their favorite. I, for one, couldn’t agree more with this assessment.
J. R. R. Tolkien was born in South Africa in 1892. His father died shortly after his younger brother was born so his mother was forced to raise the both of them alone. To complicate matters Tolkien’s mother converted to the Catholic Church and was thereupon banished from much of her family and their support. A few years later his mother also died leaving the boys to be raised by her parish priest.
Tolkien proceeded through school in a fairly unremarkable way except for his unusual giftedness in languages – not just in speaking them, but understanding how they worked. Some children make up their own words – Tolkien made up his own languages. He pursued this love of words through studies at Oxford and later returned to teach philology there. He remains one of Oxford’s most celebrated professors. Through his study of languages he became exposed to the mythologies of the world. He wrote The Lord of the Rings, he later said, to give England her own myth.
The setting for this myth is Middle Earth, a land Tolkien first described to the world in The Hobbit, a work he first wrote for his children. The story is about Bilbo Baggins, an unassuming hobbit that gets swept into an adventure (much to his chagrin) with thirteen dwarves and a wizard. (Hobbits are man-like creatures about half the size of a normal human. They live in holes, usually; they love to eat, garden, and give gifts. Most of all, they love to stay home.) Along the way Bilbo becomes the owner of a magic ring that became the center of Tolkien’s masterpiece. The Lord of the Rings is an epic tale about the ring and how it fits into history.
Tolkien’s work has impacted me like no other author. Though many people recognize the quality and contributions of Tolkien’s work to the world, there are a few things, in particular, about his life and work that have import for me.
One is Tolkien’s view of myth. Though most people see a myth as a story of something untrue, Tolkien saw myth as the exact opposite. His great friend C. S. Lewis once objected to Tolkien that, “…myths are lies, though lies breathed through silver.” “No,” said Tolkien, “they are not.” There are truths, Tolkien said, that are beyond us, transcendendant truths, about beauty, truth, honor, etc. There are truths that man knows exist, but they cannot be seen – they are immaterial, but no less real, to us. It is only through the language of myth that we can speak of these truths. We have come from God, Tolkien said, and only through myth, through story telling, can we aspire to the life we were made for with God. To write and/or read myth, Tolkien believed, was to meditate on the most important truths of life.
Tolkien believed that what he wrote in The Lord of the Rings was true, not in the sense that the events really happened, but in the sense that they portrayed truth to us in a way that everyday events could not. After reading a bit of his work a friend asked him how the story would end. Tolkien responded, “I don’t know. I shall try to find out.” He felt that he was uncovering the truth already there, only hidden.
It was Tolkien’s view of myth that that most aided C. S. Lewis in his pilgrimage to accept Christianity. All the other myths of the world, Tolkien said, are a mixture of truth and error – truth because they are written by those made by and for God – error because written by those alienated by God. But the Bible is the one true myth. It is a true accounting of truth, while everything else we do is mimicking. This perspective was decisive in Lewis’ conversion to Christianity.
The second notable thing for me is Tolkien’s value of friendship. It is a notable characteristic of his work and his life. In the LOTR, this is seen most notably in the friendships of Frodo and Sam and Frodo and Aragorn. In his life, this is seen in his friendship with C. S. Lewis. Friendships are gifts, not so much made, but given to us. Friendship occurs when two people meet who share a common perspective, experience, insight, treasure, or burden. There is a bond that occurs that brings them beyond mere acquaintances to friends. And that friendship should be cherished.
Tolkien and Lewis certainly did cherish theirs. They were together at least three times per week: on Tuesday mornings and Thursday evenings with the other “Inklings” (a literary circle of friends), and at least one other day for lunch. Tolkien wrote, “Friendship with Lewis compensates for much, and besides giving constant pleasure and comfort has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual – a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher – and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of Our Lord.” Tolkien saw that the value of friends was not just that they stand with you, but that they stand with you and see the same things as you.
Third, Tolkien’s values, again in life and in work, encourage me. Tolkien saw himself as a hobbit in every way but in stature. He loved to eat (hobbits prefer six meals a day). He loved gardening, trees and long walks in the country. He loved pipes, stories and friends. He loved his family and preferred being at home to travel. He was jovial, kindhearted and generous. He was a devout Catholic. He didn’t set out to change the world, he set out to live the life he had been given in obedience to God. Like Lewis, Tolkien believed that home, family, and our labors were the heart of our lives. And for him labor included all his work, not just that he was paid for. He normally ate all three meals and had tea at home with his family. He rarely traveled, but ate and smoked a lot. For him, home, family, and labor were godly things that pleased God more than any “good work” could.
The LOTR ends in a hobbit’s home. Some have thought ending anticlimactic given the grand scope of the epic. But this merely highlights that, for Tolkien, all the wars, heroism, and great acts of bravery are not nearly so valuable and praiseworthy as what goes on in the simple day-to-day events of our lives. We fight exciting wars so that we can lead boring lives.
Lastly, Tolkien’s life was dominated by his vision of the future – not a vision of what he would do for God, but what God would do for him. His mind was occupied with, what Calvin called, a “meditation on the afterlife.” He was fully aware and confident that “this slight, momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” Like Lewis, he felt that the fact that we long for something more is proof to us that there is something more for us. He wrote to a friend: “We were born in a dark age out of due time for us. But there is this comfort: otherwise we should not know, or so much love, what we do love. I imagine the fish out of water is the only fish to have an inkling of water.” Christians are fish out of water, living outside their environment. We are pilgrims, aliens, exiles, who soon will go home.
In December the first of three Lord of the Rings movies will be released. The other two will be released the next two Decembers. Why mention this now? Well, if you haven’t read it, now you have ten months to do so before the movie is released. As for me, I’ll be standing in line in August.

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