Welcome to The Great Hall of Poets, our regular monthly feature showcasing the talent of Middle-earth fans. Each month we will feature a small selection of the poems submitted, but we hope you will read all of the poems that we have received here in our Great Hall of Poets.
So come and join us by the hearth and enjoy!
If you have a Tolkien/Middle-earth inspired poem you’d like to share, then send it to poetry@theonering.net One poem per person may be submitted each month. Please make sure to proofread your work before sending it in. TheOneRing.net is not responsible for poems posting with spelling or grammatical errors.
The Mirror
by D. McGlinchey
Dare you look into the mirror?
Do you seek to know your fate?
Are you holding on to the life you know?
Or is your quest now far too late?
Have no fear young Hobbit
The mirror is just a guide.
What has gone and what’s to come
Is not always shown inside.
The journey on is lined with fear
But ‘hope’ will see you through.
Your friends are only here for love.
You know what you must do.
Dare you look into the mirror? Do you seek to know your fate? Are you holding on to the life you know? Or is your quest now far too late?
~~ * ~~
“No dust in our eyes”
Book One, chapter 5, A conspiracy unmasked
by: Theo van de P.
We know you so well,
almost certain what you think.
And we watched you closely,
so you would not disappear in a blink.
Yes, we understand you must go,
and no, we will not keep you.
But it’s a long & dangerous road,
and therefore we must go too.
It’s true that we are horribly afraid, and we don’t know how it ends. Indeed, the danger is very dark, But Frodo, we are your friends.
~~ * ~~
If you have a Tolkien/Middle-earth inspired poem you’d like to share, then send it to poetry@theonering.net. One poem per person may be submitted each month. Please make sure to proofread your work before sending it in. TheOneRing.net is not responsible for poems posting with spelling or grammatical errors.
During Comic-Con 2018, our friend Jerry Vanderstelt was at the Weta Workshop booth creating a beautiful art print of the Gandalf the Grey Mini Epic. I, as well as many others, asked Jerry if he could turn this into a print because we all knew folks would want to own it. Right now we have just a preview for you, cool behind the scenes, and a message from Jerry himself. Once this is officially announced, we will let you know so you can place your order.
Hi Gang.
Ok, so although some of you well know, I can officially now announce that I have a brand new piece of art coming very soon, in time for Christmas shoppers!
It is my Epic Mini stylized Gandalf art, entitled, “Gandalf the Grey”.
I will announce right here once I have an exact launch date. At that time, I will post a special promotional video with a very special guest introducing how all this came about, someone every fan of Weta Workshop and the world of Middle Earth will recognize . For now, here is the full art as well as the video link showing the painting process! This image is a very lo-res shot, but the actual print is super sharp. Sorry for the watermark, but it’s a must nowadays!
We’ve been very lucky to team up with the great folks at QMx to show off and review the very first figure in their The Lord of the Rings Q-Fig line: The Witch-king. The Q-Fig line covers lots of license but it wasn’t until just after this past Comic-Con that it set its gaze upon Middle-earth. Now we, the fans, can add some of these awesome figures to our collections.
Right now the collection includes just the standard figures which will run you roughly $20. They also have a masters version which, from what I saw at Comic-Con, are a little bigger or involve more characters. The masters versions of the Q-Fig lines tend to run in the area of $99 to $100. No matter your choice, these things are great! For my fellow collectors on a budget, this is a great avenue to go and be able to bring a little Middle-earth into your collection.
Our friends over at Asmus Toys have been celebrating Hobbit Day for the last week with an awesome giveaway. All you have to is go to the Asmus Toys Facebook Page and follow the directions. Five lucky fans will be given the chance to win one of their very cool Frodo slim figures. The contest ends this Monday, September 30th, so make sure you get your entries in now!
One of the new figures Asmus Toys had at Comic-Con this year was the solo version of the Mouth of Sauron. This piece allows fans who just want the Mouth of Sauron minus his horse a chance to get him into their collections. As you can see, this one turned out pretty solid with some incredible details on the different versions of his mouth piece. While this one is labeled as a ‘slim’ version, with all the stuff you get and how nice it looks there is nothing slim about him! You can get him right now for $145 and he is due to ship first part of next year.
This is a follow up to the story announcing Amazon’s release of the LOTR series creative team (see link below), with a breakdown on what this announcement means for the future of the show. Afterwards, there will be a ‘reaction’ story from a Tom Shippey interview that occurred on the same day as the video was released.
Justin, the producer of our TORn Tuesday live streaming series breaks down the Amazon creative team announcement:
“This Creative Team has something for everyone that it almost feels generated by an algorithm to appeal so perfectly to all fan groups. Howe & Shippey lock in the core book, art & film fans.
Amazon got what it explicitly wanted day one — the next Game of Thrones — with 2 of the key people from HBO’s Thrones now on LOTR. Amazon is also following in the (successful) footsteps of Thrones by handing the show to a couple guys who have never produced anything, similar to HBO letting Benioff & Weiss run Thrones with zero producing experience.
JA Bayona is an inspired choice as he is Guillermo del Toro’s protege in dark storytelling. GDT financed Bayona’s first few projects and helped put Bayona on the map. With Amazon, fans may finally get something akin to what The Hobbit was shaping up to be under del Toro. Some Weta folk felt that the costume & prosthetic orc work they did under Guillermo del Toro was the best the workshop had ever done, so it would be wonderful to bring forth some of that practical creativity under GDT’s heir apparent Juan Antonio Bayona.
“Peak TV” fans will appreciate the writers room of people who wrote some of the best episodes of Westworld, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Hannibal. Those are all somewhat dark & twisted fantasies which LOTR second age also is.
Amazon’s corporate development team along with this LOTR writers room and production team is probably the most diverse multi-lingual creative group ever to work in Middle-earth. Tolkien wrote that LOTR is “fundamentally linguistic in inspiration… “ so it is wonderful to have a global group of filmmakers bringing in the next chapter of Tolkien’s legacy.”
Author Tom Shippey
Shortly after the video was released by Amazon, Tom Shippey did an exclusive interview with the folks at Tolkien Gesellschaft and he let a few very interesting tidbits out of the bag.
Shippey confirms this map is from the Second Age, but then also admits we don’t know a lot of detail about the Second Age, and that the end of the Second Age on a map looks much like the beginning of the Third Age. Of course, with Numenor on the Map, that puts us closer to the early or middle part of the Second Age. He stresses that you have to be clear where in Middle-earth history the story will begin so that it matches what this map is hinting at.
Another really important fact is that Shippey clears up a lot about what sort of filming rights Amazon has, and how much freedom they do and don’t have when filling in the empty spots in their stories. Amazon must follow the history that Tolkien did write, such as Sauron invading Eriador, being forced back by a Numenorean force, his return to Numenor and seducing them to break the ban with the Valar. So, they have a road map, but they get to choose the route and fill in all the things seen and encountered on that road.
Shippey doesn’t know much detail on when and where filming will begin, but we previously announced that New Zealand looks to be where the bulk of filming will be. He also mentioned that a Brian Miller was supposed to be the overall director, but since he didn’t feature in the video he surmises that things changed. It is interesting that Shippey seems to share our desire that more news was forthcoming. Yes, all these little teases arouse curiosity, but sooner or later you have to satisfy that curiosity.
Read the article to learn more details from Tom Shippey.
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