News Archive

Marton Csokas was born in new Zealand on 30th June 1966 and is 41 today. You can see his cast bio here. There’s a picture of Marton here and some pictures of Marton in the role of Celeborn here.

A documentary film on Renaissance Martial Arts, Reclaiming The Blade,is due for release later this year. It explores both European and Asian historic swordplay and offers an in-depth look at the fascinating world of stage combat on the silver screen. John Rhys-Davies will be narrating this documentary. Interviews with Viggo Mortensen, John Anderson who was the Sword Master for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Richard Taylor of WETA Workshop and John Howe who was one of the conceptual artists for the Trilogy will also be featured.

The Release Date is set to be September 15th in the USA.

For more information visit the Official Site

The American Film Institute (AFI) has recently announced its update of the 100 greatest American movies of all time, the only Lord of the Rings movie on the list being “The Fellowship of the Ring” which took the 50th place. “Citizen Kane” kept the first place, “The Godfather” took second place and “Casablanca” appeared third. You can view the entire list at the AFI website.

CoE will be holding a T-shirt design contest. The contest will run from now until July 20th and all CoE members are welcome to participate. The winners will be awarded a prize as well as have their designs added to the CoE store on Zazzle.com. Please go here for the list of rules and more information.

A survey by author Lynette Porter has been posted online for a new book being written about LotR fandom. It takes about 5-10 minutes to complete, and the questions are simple and easy to answer. Any questions can be sent to: [email protected]

Beginning this week, The Book Club finishes our discussion of ‘The Hobbit’. Come join us and let us know what you thought of the story and how it compares with Tolkien’s other Middle-earth stories.

The realms have opened their newest competition here and would like you come by and check it out and then vote on your favorite!

Do you wish you had more themes to choose from on this site? Have you always wanted to try making your own? Do you want more pages and images in your member website? Do you wish you had a way to help your favorite Lord of the Rings site?

Now you can get all of the above by becoming a Contributing Member. For only an annual $15 contribution, you will be helping to cover our monthly server fees and keeping this site up and running. To learn more, please click here.

Following the lead of Peter Jackson, a number of the actors that starred in smaller roles in LotR are suing NewLine for a fair share of the revenues from the merchandising of their characters. In one example, Mark Ferguson , who played Gil-Galad is questioning the royalty accounting methods that turned $9 million US in merchandising revenue, from his character, into a $400 thousand US loss. You can read the full story here.

A one-week summer school course on Tolkien and Middle-earth will be held at Lancaster University, UK, from 23rd July to 27th July. The course tutor is Colin Duriez who has written guides to Middle-earth and appeared on the LotR extended DVDs as a commentator in some of the documentaries. There are further details about the course here.