‘We come to it at last – the great battle of our time.’ Or – in this case – the great battle of the Ages! On Tuesday 22nd March we’ll kick off this year’s Middle-earth March Madness; and the theme is A Battle of the Ages.
Each of the four brackets this year represents an Age in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. This is the perfect opportunity to brush up on your history, as we get ready for Amazon’s Rings of Power – and the events of the Second Age – in September.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll have some posts to explore these brackets in more depth. What happened in the time of the Two Trees? Who conquered Glaurung in the First Age? And just when were those rings forged in the Second Age? Get ready to explore some History of Middle-earth together, as we vote to decide fandom’s favourite event from thousands of years.
How does it work, you ask? Simple! Staffers at TORn already voted to narrow down the many, many happenings to their top 64, and instead of seeding this year, the events appear in chronological order in each bracket. For each round, we will have a poll, where you vote for your choice in each match-up. Is Gandalf falling to the Balrog more significant than the Last March of the Ents? Are you more interested in when Beren first sees Luthien, or when they recover a Silmaril together? Which is more terrible – the destruction of the Two Trees, or the Elven Kinslaying? You decide!
Join us on Tuesday to kick off the Middle-earth March Madness tournament for 2022. 64 events will start out – but only one will be crowned Champion!
The original music heard in the record-breaking The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power teaser trailer was composed by Felix Erskine.
Music continues to be top of mind for fans as Amazon Prime Video’s show kicks into gear. Thanks to a new Spy Report from Jim J Ware we can confirm that Cavalry Music is responsible for the epic score in the teaser.
Erskine is a London-born composer and the founder of Cavalry Music. A music prodigy, he studied Classical Guitar and Composition at the prestigious Royal College of Music at the age of 11 and spent his early music career working alongside composers like Brian Eno and Michael Kamen.
Erskine also arranged music for the recent KENOBI trailer from Disney+, which included an epic Duel of the Fates drop that some consider John Williams best-ever work. This guy knows how to blend celebrated old themes with the new, so why wasn’t he allowed to do the same with any of Shore’s iconic LOTR themes?
I hear you. I hear you. I hear you. But Duel of the Fates is the best thing John Williams has ever done. The end. Best.
The question remains: Where is Howard Shore & Bear McCreary in all this? There have been rumors and suggestive posts everywhere from Deadline to Instagram comments (suspiciously deleted).
Watch Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power superbowl teaser again:
As we wait – eagerly or anxiously – for new Middle-earth content in the form of Amazon’s upcoming Rings of Power tv show, we can pass some of the time with new content direct from the Professor himself. On February 26th the Tolkien Estate relaunched their website, releasing previously unseen material from their archives.
The exciting new reveals include draft manuscripts, letters, and even audio and video clips of Tolkien and his son, Christopher. You can read more about this release here; and you can find the Tolkien Estate website here.
As we all know, Prime Video’s teaser trailer for The Rings of Power was released on Sunday 13 February, and aired during the Super Bowl. With 257 million views in the first day, the teaser trailer has broken Super Bowl records (as reported by SyFy Wire). TORn’s own Official Trailer Watch Party, in partnership with Prime Video, and with a host of guests, had peak concurrent viewers over 65k. Whether you’re thrilled with the teaser, or skeptical about what’s coming in September, there’s no doubt that fans are interested.
We asked fans to share their reactions with us as they watched the trailer for the first time, tweeting to #LOTRFans. Prime Video have cut together some of these reactions, which you can watch below. And now we wait; what will be revealed next…?
Writer Joanna Robinson sure has been busy. Over on The Ringer (not actually a Tolkien site, believe it or not), she writes cogently on the commonalities and differences between the “Harfoots” we’ll see in Amazon’s The Rings of Power series, and the Hobbits we know rather better from The Lords of the Rings and The Hobbit.
She muses on how hobbits function as a crucial mediating influence into Tolkien’s milieu — and how that probably serves double for wider audiences outside core Tolkien fandom, a wider audience whose emotional attachment is mostly via Peter Jackson’s films.
And she explores the applicability of Hobbits to the WWI and WWII experiences of J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien, and of the British folk in general.
Hobbits can be seen as the proxies for Tolkien’s children, but as with all things with the author, there’s also something much darker at play here. Tolkien abhorred any attempts to turn his Middle Earth books into simple allegories for the two world wars he lived and wrote through. Still it’s very hard not to see his hobbits as the “everyman” analogues for the pastoral Brits who were drawn into the horrors of the First World War and then the even greater terrors of WWII, as Tolkien and his sons were, respectively. In that way, Bilbo of The Hobbit—who is press-ganged into leaving his cozy hobbit hole by a wizard and a pack of dwarves—reminds us of the young J.R.R. Tolkien, who was so reluctant to go off to war at the tender age of 22 he used an academic deferral to delay enlisting.
In a 1941 letter to his son Michael, Tolkien recalled: “In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage.” A few years later Tolkien did, reluctantly, go to war. He wrote: “Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then … it was like a death.”
DON’T FORGET! Joanna Robinson will be joining TORn Tuesday tomorrow from 5pm PT, 8pm ET to discuss her Rings of Power experience with Staffers Quickbeam and Justin. Join us then, and be sure to bring your own burning questions!
Following on from last night’s teaser trailer, Prime video have now revealed names and actors behind three more of those character posters.
This is High King Gil-galad, played by Benjamin Walker. In the teaser trailer, we see him standing on a stone platform – presumably in Lindon – golden leaves around his feet, staring up into the sky – presumably watching the meteor we saw soaring overhead.
It was clear this would be one of our Harfoots – but we didn’t know which one. She is Elanor ‘Nori’ Brandyfoot, played by Markella Kavenagh – who seems to be the narrator of the teaser trailer. Is there some significance to her dwarven style nickname? And a thought about that last name: etymology of ‘Brandywine’ can be from dutch ‘brandwijn’ or icelandic ‘brennevin’ – ‘burn (or distil) wine’; OR it can come from welsh name Branwen, ‘raven fair’. So here it could mean ‘raven foot’ (dark hairs on toes, presumably); or possibly ‘burn foot’ – perhaps foreshadowing the fiery pit she appears to walk into in the teaser trailer…?
Prime video are not giving us much to go on with this one – they call him The Stranger, played by Daniel Weyman. Is this the man we saw in the pit of fire, with one of the Harfoots reaching out to him? It is certainly his hand we see, holding a Harfoot hand, at the end of the trailer. Who is he? Annatar? One of the Istari? Some entirely new character…?
We hope you enjoyed our Official Trailer Watch Party last night – staff and guests went over five hours, poring over every detail of the trailer, wondering what it all might mean, and sharing our hopes and fears. We’ll bring you any more news as soon as we have it!
