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Hobbits, elves and Middle-earthlings across the globe will mark the 50th anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s death this weekend. The English scholar and author best known for the worlds he created in “The Lord of the Rings” and other books died of pneumonia on Sept. 2, 1973, at age 81. Tolkien had a remarkable career, one which continues to touch lives, not only in his literature, but through the relationships he fostered, including one with his fellow Oxford don C.S. Lewis. Last year, an article in the lifestyle magazine Town & Country said “It is impossible to overstate how much Lewis...

olkien made this narration before The Lord of the Rings had found a publisher. He was rather disillusioned, even despairing about it's prospects, and had lost faith in his ability as a writer. He was visiting the house of a friend, and this friend had bought a fairly newfangled device: a tape recorder. After messing with it a bit, recording The Lord's Prayer (to exorcise any evil spirits in it, for Tolkien was a bit suspicious of new tech), his friend suggested that he record his favourite passage from his new book. Tolkien did so, and on replaying it, the...

Rings of Power is glorified fan fiction with a multi-million dollar budget.The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is commercialism in all its glory—and gore. It is a billion-dollar visual feast built from the breadcrumbs left behind by J.R.R. Tolkien. Amazon Prime Video’s new offering—described as Jeff Bezos’ vanity project—promises to slake our thirst for high fantasy. But it takes creative liberties that make purists cringe. In 2017, Amazon bought the television rights to The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy, The Hobbit and the appendices for $250 million, and then poured another $465 million into the first...

MOUNT DOOM—Governor Gretchen Whitmer is refusing to throw the Ring of Power back into Mount Doom, despite the Michigan Supreme Court ordering her to return it into the fires whence it came. "Throw it into the fire! Destroy it!" shouted a judge sitting on the court, after leading Whitmer to the Cracks of Doom. "We can end this all right now!" "Nooo! Not my precious!" Whitmer screamed as the state Supreme Court handed down the order to destroy the Ring. "Nasty, nasty Constitution! We don't likes it! Nasty, fat Founding Fathers!" She turned and left.

Last week, amid churning news cycles about impeachment and Iran and global trade deals, an era quietly ended. Christopher Tolkien, the third and youngest son of “Lord of the Rings” author J.R.R. Tolkien, died at the age of 95. The younger Tolkien, who spent the last four decades of his life completing his father’s grand artistic vision, was one of the great unsung literary heroes of the last century. For countless readers whose imaginations were molded in part by the legendarium of Middle Earth, his passing severs the last living link to another existential plane.His obituaries variously describe Tolkien as...

A battlefield of 3,250 years ago in Germany is yielding remains of wounded warriors, wooden clubs, spear points, flint and bronze arrowheads and bronze knives and swords. The gruesome scene, frozen in time by peat, is unlike anything else from the Bronze Age in Northern Europe, where, researchers thought, large-scale warfare didn’t begin until later. Analysis of the remains of the 130 men, most between ages 20 and 30, found so far shows some may have been from hundreds of kilometers away—Poland, Holland, Scandinavia and Southern Europe. The hand-to-hand combat of the battle, which may have involved thousands of people...

The artifact provides an amazing insight into Tolkien's mind - including his observation that Hobbiton is on the same latitude as the city of Oxford. It also suggests that Ravenna in Italy is the inspiration behind Minas Tirith, a fictional city that became the heavily fortified capital of Gondor. And it references Cyprus, Belgrade and Jerusalem.

Divers have found traces of ancient land swallowed by waves 8500 years ago Doggerland once stretched from Scotland to Denmark Rivers seen underwater by seismic scans Britain was not an island - and area under North Sea was roamed by mammoths and other giant animals Described as the 'real heartland' of Europe Had population of tens of thousands - but devastated by sea level risesBritain's Atlantis' - a hidden underwater world swallowed by the North Sea - has been discovered by divers working with science teams from the University of St Andrews. Doggerland, a huge area of dry land that...

Controversial Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been described as the savior of the Islamic world and as a new Ottoman sultan. But likening him to the wizard Saruman from The Lord of the Rings is novel—as was done earlier this week by a leader in the Turkish opposition party: “[Turkey has become] a country where headlines and program flows can change with one phone call as if it were Middle-Earth in Lord of the Rings. The [person] who does it is like a Saruman the White who has lost all sense of shame,” Republican People’s Party’s [CHP] deputy...

Sen. John McCain is talking with Democrats about a joint effort to require outside groups that have spent millions of dollars on this year’s elections to disclose their donors. McCain (R-Ariz.), once Congress’s leading champion of campaign finance reform, has kept a low profile on the issue in recent years. He raised the ire of many Republicans a decade ago for pushing comprehensive reform, and many Republicans still held it against him during his 2008 presidential campaign.

Monday, 15 January 2007 Hobbit like humans show Indonesia was "middle earth" Anna Henderson In a world first, a book detailing the discovery of a lost species of hobbit-like people who lived on a remote tropical Indonesian island less than 20,000 years ago was launched in Armidale in northern NSW on Saturday. According to research completed by University of New England Professor, Mike Moorwood, the artefacts his group unearthed during a 2003 archaeological dig on Flores Island suggest a kind of "middle earth" existed there, with metre-high humans hunting miniature elephants, giant rodents and Komodo dragons. Professor Moorwood wrote "The...

TORONTO (Reuters) - The "Lord of the Rings" musical, touted as the most expensive stage production yet, met mixed reviews on Friday as critics applauded its leaping orcs and menacing dark riders, but got lost in the tangled plots of Middle Earth. The 55-strong cast slipped into 500 costumes and engaged in fight scenes and acrobatics atop a 40-ton, computer-controlled stage floor featuring 17 elevators, which spun and rose amid magic and illusion. For all the feverish activity at Toronto's Princess of Wales Theatre, the show based on J.R.R. Tolkien's epic trilogy drew only one standing ovation in more than...

The Women of Middle EarthIn the midst of piles of Lord of the Rings merchandise on every shelf, Tolkien’s wisdom is applied to just about everything — Tolkien and industrialization, Tolkien and communism, Tolkien and religion, etc. What’s surprising, especially in today’s hypersensitive post-Gloria Steinem world, is the dearth of commentary on Tolkien and women. The Bittersweet Complexities of True Womanhood Even as I researched this article, the only writings on Tolkien and feminism I found were on websites for freebee high school essays. Why is there seemingly so little written about Tolkien and women? Tolkien critics have accused the...

PEACE IN MIDDLE EARTH IN OUR TIME MINAS TIRITH (Gondor News Network) - Thousands of peace activists took to the streets of Minas Tirith and other cities of Middle Earth today to protest what they termed a rush to war with Mordor. "We need more time for diplomacy," said a key member of the Middle-Earth Security Council, Saruman the White. "I am not convinced by the evidence presented by my esteemed colleague, Gandalf the Grey, or that the Dark Lord Sauron presents an imminent danger to the peoples of the West." Many of the people protesting war in Mordor agreed...

Death and Funerary Customs in Middle-earthI would like you to take with me on a perilous journey. As readers of Tolkien you will perhaps recall the two types of journey for which he is famed. The first is the hero-quest, as exemplified by Bilbo Baggins in the The Hobbit, and second is the allegorical death journey, most explicitly taken by Niggle in Leaf by Niggle. Death is one of a handful of life experiences which are irrevocable changes. Like birth, it is a one-way ticket. Unlike birth, it usually occurs when the individual has made many links with his or...

    The door to the Mines of Moria Viking-era carvings on Sweden's Sigurd Rock   Viking ship post (circa A.D. 850)(Photograph from National Geographic Television) Stonehenge, one of the many ancient British ruins that inspired Tolkien(Photograph from National Geographic Television) A transcript of Tolkien's lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”(Photograph from National Geographic Television and Jane Chance) Akseli Gallen-Kallela's 1891 painting “Aino Myth,” which depicts a passage from the Kalevala, a compilation of old Finnish ballads and poems(Photograph courtesy Art Museum of Ateneum) Ian McKellen as Gandalf(© 2001 New Line Productions, photograph courtesy New Line Cinema)  ...

ON TOLKIEN Growing up with language The Shakespeare of model languages is J.R.R. Tolkien. His best-selling fantasy novel, The Lord Of The Rings, now considered a literary classic, achieved much of its believability from the depth of its invented languages: Quenya, Sindarin, Adu^naic and others. The following article provides a broad overview of Tolkien's seminal work with model languages. Tolkien was exposed to languages to a remarkable degree. He learned Latin, German and French from his mother. At school, he learned or taught himself Middle English, Old English, Finnish, Gothic, Greek, Italian, Old Norse, Spanish, modern Welsh and medieval Welsh....

A Tolkien Virgin: Of Aule and Yavannaby Mark-EdmondThe Journey ContinuesWow. So, the Elves and Men--for all their differences--are the Children of Illuvatar, but the Dwarves were made by Aule. This passage is short, but amazing. When Aule raised up his hammer to destroy the Dwarves he made, but Illuvatar gave them life instead, it actually caused me to get misty-eyed. This act of kindness and compassion is truly beautiful.In this section, we also have our first taste of dissention among the Valar (excluding Melkor). Yavanna fears that Aule's Dwarves will destroy her living things, and when she gets word from...

LOS ANGELES - "Catch Me If You Can" couldn't catch up with "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers." The "Lord of the Rings" sequel took in $48.9 million during its second weekend for a 12-day gross of $200.1 million, becoming one of the speediest films ever to cross the $200 million mark, according to studio estimates Sunday. Its weekend average of $13,508 per theater had "Two Towers" fulfilling predictions that it would outperform its predecessor, last year's "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring." "This film is the story of the holiday season," said Paul...

The Merchants of Middle-earthEvery now and then someone asks whether money was used in Middle-earth. It's hard to find evidence of money in The Lord of the Rings but there are some references to it. When Gandalf arrived in Hobbiton with a wagon-load of fireworks for Bilbo and Frodo's last birthday party together, Hobbit children followed him to Bag End hoping for some advance goodies. But instead Bilbo gave away a few pennies and sent the children on their ways. Gaffer Gamgee also notes that Bilbo is free with "his money" while talking with friends in a local inn..Tolkien goes...