Free Republic

Read by Phil Dragash and edited, and mixed, sound-effected, and designed, and painted as well. Forgive the many mistakes and glitches. I'm the only one working on this after all!

Peter Jackson's hotly-anticipated movie The Hobbit is not out until 2012 - but that doesn't mean fans have to wait for a taste.For a Montana man has created a 1,000sq-ft Hobbit-themed guest house for those who love the J.R.R Tolkien books and characters like Bilbo Baggins.

New observations from the Herschel Space Observatory show a bizarre, twisted ring of dense gas at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Only a few portions of the ring, which stretches across more than 600 light-years, were known before. Herschel's view reveals the entire ring for the first time, and a strange kink that has astronomers scratching their heads. "We have looked at this region at the center of the Milky Way many times before in the infrared," said Alberto Noriega-Crespo of NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "But when we...

"An Exclusive Look at 'The Hobbit' Dwarves" Peter Jackson's upcoming film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, has been hotly anticipated by everyone from Tolkien obsessives to film buffs. The crew behind the movie, including Jackson himself, has kept fans salivating by documenting the movie's production through blog posts and videos. But TIME is the first to bring you this image of two characters from the film, dwarves named Balin and Dwalin. Below, find Warner Bros.' description of the two, and then click on for more images of The Hobbit's beloved dwarves. Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/07/15/time-exclusive-first-look-at-balin-and-dwalin-from-the-hobbit-movie/#ixzz1SQRm5Fha"

Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" A Catholic Worldview Wed. April 6 at 10 PM ET, Fri. April 8 at 1 PM ET, Sat. April 9 at 5 AM ET Joseph Pearce uncovers the Catholicism found in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. From Education Resource CenterFinding Frodo’s FaithJOSEPH PEARCEThe Lord of the Rings is every bit as Catholic as its author. It is not only written by a Catholic, it is so Catholic that only a Catholic could have written it. What is the secret of J.R.R. Tolkien's success with The Lord of the Rings? How...

In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit… Wellington, NZ, March 21, 2011—Production has commenced in Wellington, New Zealand, on “The Hobbit,” filmmaker Peter Jackson’s two film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s widely read masterpiece. “The Hobbit” is set in Middle-earth 60 years before Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” which Jackson and his filmmaking team brought to the big screen in the blockbuster trilogy that culminated with the Oscar-winning “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.” The two films, with screenplays by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson, will be shot...

Exclusive: Dual Hobbit Film Titles Revealed? March 2nd, 2011 by Calisuri | Discuss | 6 Comments and 66 Reactions Ringer Spy Mr. Underbelly monitors movie titles that are registered by major film studios. Mr. Underbelly noticed that New Line has recently registered the following two film titles: The Hobbit: There and Back Again and… The Hobbit: An/The Unexpected Journey This is the first indication of what the ‘official’ titles will be of the two Hobbit films. What are your thoughts? Remember, this is not confirmed officially, but it is a relatively good indication of what the two film titles could...

At The School of Education, UWIC (The University of Wales in Cardiff), Tom Shippey, Professor Emeritus of English, St. Louis University, will deliver an Open Lecture called: Writing into the Gap: Tolkien's The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrún Tom Shippey has published extensively on medieval literature, and has recently been working on ‘medievalism’ and romantic nationalism, focusing on the work of Jacob Grimm. He established Tolkien scholarship by his acclaimed monograph The Road to Middle-earth, now supplemented by J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. As the foremost Tolkien scholar, he contributed in the documentaries associated with Peter Jackson’s adaptation of...

BookMoot sends this in: Here is a nice post about the history of History of Hobbit illustrations at children’s author Tony DiTerlizzi’s site. Since, he has shared an illustration by “Where the Wild Things Are” illustrator, Maurice Sendak who was set to illustrate the Hobbit but suffered health issues that prevented the project going forward. Thought this was interesting. http://diterlizzi.com/blog/books-there-and-back-again/

“The spirit of wickedness in high places is now so powerful and so many-headed in its incarnations,” Tolkien wrote in 1969, “that there seems nothing more to do than personally to refuse to worship any of the hydras’ heads.” The world, he thought, seemed little better than a new Tower of Babel, “all noise and confusion.”Yet, armed with Grace, citizens of the City of God should remain constant in their defense of all that is good.... With the Incarnation of Christ, “art has been verified,” Tolkien claimed. “God is the Lord, of angels, and of men–and of elves. Legend and...

PETER Jackson's troubled Hobbit project has become embroiled in a race row after a would-be extra was told she was too dark to play one of the pint-sized Tolkien creatures, reports said. Briton Naz Humphreys, who has Pakistani heritage, attended a casting session in the New Zealand city of Hamilton last week, queueing for three hours only to be told her skin tone was not suitable, the Waikato Times reported. "It's 2010 and I still can't believe I'm being discriminated against because I have brown skin," Humphreys told the newspaper. "The casting manager basically said they weren't having anybody who...

Many of us Ringers know the comparisons of The Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter are many. Well, Film.com has compiled a few for your reading pleasure. Enjoy! Fantasy stories generally lift from the same mythological source bank. Actually, if you want to get super scholarly and esoteric about it, every story (especially the more sword-and-sorcery themed variety) is the same basic “hero’s journey” archetype detailed by Joseph Campbell. But fantasy stories — King Arthur, Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Willow, Peter Pan, Conan the Barbarian — build their world out of the same objects. You...

"Perhaps Bilbo Baggins' tale of wanderlust won't be leaving the Shire after all. Numerous international unions, including SAG and AFTRA, have sent out alerts advising members to ditch work on Peter Jackson's highly anticipated production of The Hobbit."

We've learned a lot of quirky facts about Christine O'Donnell. We already knew the Republican Senate nominee abhorred masturbation and believed that looking at pornography was cheating. Well, yesterday, we learned yet more about her view of relations between the sexes – through, of all things, her analysis of J.R.R. Tolkien's work. In a 2003 essay, she wrote about the roles of women in "Lord of the Rings" and argued that Tolkein's female characters offer "insight into what it means to be a woman." But, more importantly, O'Donnell's exegesis gives insight into what she thinks it means to be a...

Magpie writes: Doug Adams is letting us peek inside his upcoming book on the LOTR film music. Check out musicoflotr.com.

Tolkien and Dickens descendants collaborate on children’s fantasy August 11th, 2010 by xoanon Poet Michael GR Tolkien’s reworking of classic children’s fantasy is read for audiobook by Charles Dickens’s great-great grandson. It is a match made in publicists’ heaven: the grandson of JRR Tolkien and the great-great grandson of Charles Dickens have collaborated for the first time on a verse retelling of a classic fantasy story. Poet Michael GR Tolkien, the eldest grandson of the Lord of the Rings author, was inspired by Florence Bone’s prose fantasy for children, The Rose-Coloured Wish, first published in 1923. Telling the story of...

Even among fantasy devotees who recognize Tolkien as the father of the modern genre, few realize that Tolkien insisted that The Lord of the Rings is "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work." This probably comes as a surprise to most Catholics as well.   Readers of The Lord of the Rings are unlikely to find a "Catholic Middle-earth" by looking for overt references to the Christian gospel or hidden Catholic symbolism -- Tolkien rejected this type of analysis -- however they will find it by looking at Tolkien's motivations as a writer.     Hobbies of an Oxford Don...

Although it might seem unlikely that anyone would wonder whether the author of The Lord of the Rings was Jewish, the Nazis took no chances. When the publishing firm of Ruetten & Loening was negotiating with J. R. R. Tolkien over a German translation of The Hobbit in 1938, they demanded that Tolkien provide written assurance that he was an Aryan. Tolkien chastised the publishers for “impertinent and irrelevant inquiries,” and—ever the professor of philology— lectured them on the proper meaning of the term: “As far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any...

The night deepened. There came the soft sound of Donkeys led with stealth along the lane. Outside the gate they stopped, and three black figures entered, like shades of night creeping across the ground. One went to the White House, two to the Capitol Building on either side; and there they stood, as still as the shadows of stones, while Amendments went slowly on. The House and the Senate seemed to be waiting breathlessly. There was a faint stir in the leaves, and a RINO cried far away. The cold hour before Reconciliation was passing. The figure by the door...

One cost more than £200 million, took eight years to film using the spectacular scenery of New Zealand and won 17 Oscars. The other cost £25,000, was filmed over a year in muddy English locations, and has not been nominated for any awards. But for Lord Of The Rings trilogy fanatic Kate Madison, filming a prequel was the purest form of art - a labour of love.