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Has Amazon found the Game of Thrones it’s been seeking? A Lord of the Rings TV series is in the very early development stages, according to The Hollywood Reporter, from Warner Bros. Television, whose feature-film division produced the LOTR movies. There’s no writer attached to the project yet — Warner Bros. is still looking to nail down the rights from the estate of book author J.R.R. Tolkien — but Amazon Studios has already emerged as an potential home. Rings, of course, has already been adapted into a trilogy of films directed by Peter Jackson, which grossed nearly $3 billion at...

What better way to celebrate #TolkienReadingDay than to hear from the author himself? Each year on March 25, Tolkien fans around the world mark the day by reading one of the many works penned by the popular Catholic author. According to the Tolkien Society, the annual event “has been organised by the Tolkien Society since 2003 to encourage fans to celebrate and promote the life and works of J.R.R. Tolkien by reading favorite passages.” Read more: Tolkien’s Middle-Earth love story, Beren and Luthien, to be published in 2017 The date of March 25 has special significance to fans and Catholics...

Next month one Brooklyn theater will explore that question in a Monty Python-esque comedy entitled The Beatles Present ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Musical.” The writer and director of the show wanted to explore, in a comedic way, what might have happened had Tolkien given a green light to the original project proposed by The Beatles.Well before Peter Jackson took on the weighty task of bringing J.R.R. Tolkien’s realm of Middle-Earth to moviegoers, The Fab Four had approached the Catholic author in hopes of filling the roles of Frodo, Gandalf and company.During the 60s and 70s the highly successful...

IN the summer of 1916, a young Oxford academic embarked for France as a second lieutenant in the British Expeditionary Force. The Great War, as World War I was known, was only half-done, but already its industrial carnage had no parallel in European history. “Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute,” recalled J. R. R. Tolkien. “Parting from my wife,” he wrote, doubting that he would survive the trenches, “was like a death.”

In this Jubilee Year of Mercy, Pope Francis wants the faithful to recognize God’s mercy toward each individual soul, and then in turn to show increased mercy toward one another. In his bull proclaiming the Jubilee, our Holy Father affirms “we are called to show mercy because mercy has first been shown to us. Pardoning offences becomes the clearest expression of merciful love, and for us Christians it is an imperative from which we cannot excuse ourselves.� Mercy can, however, seem rather abstract to us; the imagination may need some prodding. Few books provide a better depiction of mercy...

124 years ago today, on January 3, 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein Africa. Forty-five years later, in 1937, his book The Hobbit, was published which he had written for his children. Together with its sequel, The Lord of the Rings, it launched generations of readers on adventures through the invented world of Middle-earth that would impact many of us for the rest of our lives.

An important, and frankly amazing Tolkien document has emerged, recently discovered loose in a copy of The Lord of the Rings once owned by illustrator Pauline Baynes. The Guardian reports that Baynes removed the map from a previous version of the novel as she was working on a then new color map for a new edition that was published in 1970. The map then had “copious” notes made by J.R.R. Tolkien in green ink and pencil. Baynes then made her own notes on the map. It is essentially a map annotated by Tolkien himself.

J.R.R. Tolkien, the British author best known for The Hobbit and his epic trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, was an astute critic of socialism and utopianism and a passionate defender of liberty, says Jay Richards, co-author of The Hobbit Party, which he calls “a study of the political and economic implications of Tolkien’s thought.” “Certainly anyone that’s seen The Lord of the Rings, for instance, at the movies knows that he was deeply concerned about the dangers and the temptations of absolute power. "The symbol of the one ring, of course. It’s not just a symbol of the sort...

Peter Jackson has said he won't be making anymore movies based on J. R. R. Tolkien's work, because the estate won't let him. SNIP The writer's son Christopher, who was appointed by his father as his literary executor, said that he was disappointed by the way the movies had diluted the artistry of the novels. He told Le Monde in 2012: 'Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed by the absurdity of our time. 'The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work and what it has become has overwhelmed me. The commercialisation has...

Perhaps explaining why those Hobbit movies cost so much damn money to make, Entertainment Weekly has revealed that The Hobbit: The Battle Of Five Armies will end with a 45-minute battle scene. Director Peter Jackson spoke with EW about the logistics of creating such an epic climax. “We have dwarves and men and elves and orcs, all with different cultures, with different weapons, and different shields and patterns and tactics,” Jackson explains, before sharing the highly scientific way he maps out his fight scenes:

The soundtrack to the Lord of the Rings film trilogy has been deemed the best of all time, beating John Williams' 1977 Star Wars score into second place.Composer Howard Shore's accompaniment won the Classic FM listeners' accolade for the fifth consecutive year.Hans Zimmer's music to Gladiator, Schindler's List by John Williams and John Barry's soaring Out of Africa score made the top five.

1. Nicolas Cage passed up the role of Aragorn because of “family obligations.” 2. Daniel Day-Lewis also turned down the role multiple times. 3. The same fight choreographer and fencer who worked on Lord of the Rings also worked on The Parent Trap and Star Wars. 4. And he said that Viggo Mortensen was “the best swordsman [he] ever trained.”

So much for that fellowship of the ring. Viggo Mortensen took a shot at Peter Jackson's dependence on visual effects in the "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy films, which are widely considered to have launched the actor's career to a higher level. In a frank interview with London's The Telegraph, the 55-year-old star of the upcoming "Two Faces of January" gave a thumbs-down to every J.R.R. Tolkien adaptation his former director has made since the first installment, 2001's "The Fellowship of the Ring."

In a recent interview, Richard Armitage revealed that he was quite emotional about the completion of the trilogy. The 42-year-old actor spoke with BANG Showbiz about finally wrapping the trilogy and how now that the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogy was completed, he was very moved. "It will be 15 years of Peter Jackson's work, there'll be six movies to watch, but it could be the final time. There's something moving about that," he said.

The harrowing battle scenes and heartache in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy masterpiece The Lord Of The Rings were inspired by the author’s own First World War nightmare and the death of close friends from Birmingham.

It’s the film project that many of us fear we may never see. Yet surely, with time, all may be possible. In this article, Rud the Spud takes a look at how a trilogy based on Professor Tolkien’s The Silmarillion might be constructed – should such a project ever come to fruition – and discusses whether or not it could possibily live up to the Professor’s massive collection of stories. The Silmarillion Movie Trilogy By Rud the Spud It’s an idea that has been capturing the minds of Ringers since the days of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings...

Peter Jackson has made some remarkable movies. There’s no denying that his sprawling Lord of the Rings trilogy was the very definition of epic—filled with massive battles, touching moments, and beautiful cinematography, not to mention a lovely score.

WH Auden attempted to persuade JRR Tolkien to drop the romance between Aragorn and Arwen from the storyline of The Lord of the Rings, describing it as "unnecessary and perfunctory", an unpublished letter by the author has revealed. The 1955 letter sees Tolkien writing to his publisher about the difficulties of completing The Return of the King, the third and final part of his magnum opus, in which Aragorn and his men face a final battle with Sauron's troops, as the hobbits Frodo and Sam continue on their journey to destroy the One Ring. At the end, Aragorn is crowned...

2014 birthday toast On the 3rd January 1892 JRR Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa. To celebrate this event, on this day each year Tolkien fans around the world were invited to raise a glass and toast the birthday of this much loved author 21:00 (9 pm) your local time. The toast is "The Professor". For those unfamiliar with British toast-drinking ceremonies: To make the Birthday Toast, you stand, raise a glass of your choice of drink (not necessarily alcoholic), and say the words 'The Professor' before taking a sip (or swig, if that's more appropriate for your drink)....

Joseph Pearce writes ... I'm at EWTN at the moment and had a sneak preview of the forthcoming Hobbit special on which we worked. It's truly superb and you are as wonderful as ever! It's being aired on December 5th. Can't wait to see it! We filmed two specials - one on The Hobbit and one on The Lord of the Rings.  I have not yet heard when the second one will air.  I play Tolkien in both specials and Joseph offers his insightful commentary on the Catholic elements in Tolkien's works.  I'll pass long more info as it's passed...