Join Kili and Mike the Guide for a tour of several Lord of the Rings filming locations, including…
Continue ReadingJoin Kili and Mike the Guide for a tour of several Lord of the Rings filming locations, including Isengard, Anduin, and Rivendell!
Book your own Middle-earth adventure with Mike the Guide, recommended by not only Kili but Ian Brodie, author of the official locations guidebook, himself! Click here to learn more.
Enjoy the photos below and remember to check out our Happy Hobbit YouTube channel for many more videos from New Zealand and the California shire! A great place to start is this playlist:
As some of you may have noticed, my March madness really was spent in Middle-earth! In the month I spent in New Zealand, I had the immense pleasure of visiting the Hobbiton Movie Set in Matamata. Journey with me now to the Shire to experience your own adventure in Hobbiton!
And please feel free to peruse the photos below!
Ringer kiwifan has told us that Aidan Turner’s new mini-series “Poldark” will be heading to the small screen very soon. Aidan’s co-stars include Eleanor Tomlinson (Death Comes to Pemberley), Heida Reed (Silent Witness), Ruby Bentall (The Paradise), Jack Farthing (Blandings), Kyle Solder (Anna Karenina), the late Warren Clarke (Red Riding), Phil Davies (Whitechapel), Beatie Edney (Poirot) and Robin Ellis, who played the title role in the original 1975-77 BBC adaptation of Winston Graham’s acclaimed novels.
Poldark starts on BBC One in the UK on Sunday 8 March at 9 pm and in the US on PBS Masterpiece on 14 June. It will also be on ABC in Australia.
Aidan says of the extensive riding required, “Luckily I did a lot of riding in New Zealand when we were there filming The Hobbit. I trained a lot and thought I’d leave a pretty good rider – thank God I did as there was a lot of riding in Poldark. It’s very much a part of who Ross is, so it’s immediately getting you into character.” [Read More]
Join Farmer Maggot, Dis, and special guest Tom Bombadil to learn a little about mushrooms!
Thanks to Ringer Bellerophon, we have the banner featuring Thorin, Fili and Kili in super high resolution. And for those of you who prefer a clean verison, we have that as well.
Just click for the image the large (5,000 pixel) version. Continue reading “Thorin, Fili and Kili banner in super high-resolution”
Back at the start of the summer, staffer GreenDragon generously asked the publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to send me a copy of Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf to review. While I started the book right away, this review has been delayed by producing Happy Hobbit and attending four conventions, along with writing two books and a script on top of daily life and work, which is a long-winded way to say that I apologize for my tardiness!
While still an undergrad, I took a course in Old English which was an introduction to the language, followed by a semester of translating Beowulf. A year isn’t enough time to master a dead language, and I was attempting to master two at once, for I was also taking Latin at the time (an alternate nickname for me could be Hermione), so I won’t be able to go into the nitty gritty mechanics of the language like Tolkien does in his notes, but I will offer what insight my education allows!
To offer some context, I will say that Old English is the name we have given to the Anglo Saxon language, for after a strong French influence after the Norman Conquest of 1066, Old English morphed into Modern English. It is important to note, as well, that Anglo Saxon is the language of our (even if you aren’t of English descent, you’re reading this in English) conquerors, for the Nordic tribes of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded England after the withdrawal of the Roman Empire around 410 CE. They renamed the island Angle-Land. England. So while Beowulf is attributed as being the first great epic in English, it is significant that it is a story from the culture that conquered the island and that its setting is in the conquering nation’s homeland in the north, not England, even though the manuscript was recorded and found in an English monastery, hidden beneath pages of religious text. All of this would have been known to J.R.R. Tolkien at the time of his translation in the 1920s.
Firstly, I will say that my reason for taking Old English was driven by my obsession with Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. I was first exposed to Beowulf in seventh grade when I read a version of the poem for one of my classes. Enamored with the culture and the exciting, heroic tale, it lingered in my mind in a way that few stories read for school had. In the Humanities Honors Program in college, we were exposed to the literature that laid the foundations for Western civilization and I once again read a translation of Beowulf (picturing Aragorn as Beowulf this time around, of course) and while in my proceeding English courses I avoided the works I had already read, Beowulf was the one text I would read every time I was asked. As such, I have been exposed to three or four translations, including my own.
