An unused file in the OS X calendar has revealed the remnants of a great easter egg, calendar dates for important points in Lord of The Rings. Find it here.
A Fiordland peak could be named Mt Tolkien, after the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Read the article here.
As more cinema patrons see the film, demand for tours of Middle Earth — or the location sets used for filming the series — is fast increasing. You too can jump on the band wagon here.
To celebrate the upcoming release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Catherine Kohman is giving away three copies of the brand new Kindle edition of Lembas for the Soul: How The Lord of the Rings Enriches Everyday Life.
To enter, please send an email to lembasfolkatgmail.com. Winners will be drawn from the first 100 emails.
According to author Simon Tolkien, the immense popularity of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies was like; “being hit by a juggernaut.” Click here to read the entire article in The Telegraph.
A few unedited shots of Luke Evans playing Bard The Bowman can be found here.
Details on the interactive official film tie-in e-books can be found by going here. and then clicking the link under ‘Latest Headlines. ( That’s the only way I could get the link to work)
For an explanation as to why you SHOULD read The Hobbit before you see the first film click here.
Professor Corey Olsen has just released a new book; Exploring JRR Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”.
Click here to hear him being interviewed, by reporter Leonie Harris, about the effect the book has had on people over the past 75 years .
Collectibles; To see what is now available from the Noble Collection click here, and to see some of the new action figures now availalble click here for Goblins, here for Thorin and two Goblins and here for Legolas and Tauriel.
Several new images and a movie trailer can be seen if you click here.
To read about a possible Stephen Colbert cameo in the films click here.
Click here to read about how Sir Ian almost didn’t return as Gandalf.
An interesting article about the unabridged audio version of The Hobbit can be found here.
Here’s a question: Just how many men were there in the West? And were they friends, cousins or perhaps even brothers?
Even if those questions weren’t troubling you as you left the theater, they were on the mind of Emil Johansson, a university student in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Johansson has spent the past several years creating a comprehensive census and family tree of all the characters — over 900 of them — created by Tolkien for his fantasy world.
If you’d like to see this family tree, check it out here.
We’ve received notification of two new books that may be of interest to the CoE community.
The first is The Hobbits: The Many Lives of Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin by Lynette Porter. From the press release: The beloved characters of Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin have been much-adapted for radio, television, film and stage. Lynette Porter follows the hobbits through these many other lives, from Tolkien’s on-page revisions and John Boorman’s unmade screenplays, through to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy and its musical counterpart. She also reviews over 50 years of ‘Hobbit Art’, including the work of Alan Lee, John Howe and Ted Nasmith.
The second is There and Back Again: J R R Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit By Mark Atherton. From the Press Release: Mark Atherton here explores the chief influences on Tolkien’s work: his boyhood in the West Midlands; the landscapes and seascapes which shaped his mythologies; his experiences in World War I; his interest in Scandinavian myth; his friendships, especially with the other Oxford-based Inklings; and the relevance of his themes, especially ecological themes, to the present-day.
To read more about the books, and to purchase if you are interested, please visit the publisher’s website at www.ibtauris.com.
The Fall Of Arthur, originally composed by Tolkien in the 1930s but abandoned for The Hobbit, has recently been edited for publication by Christopher Tolkien and will be released next year . For more details click here.
