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I’ve only read through Fellowship and halfway through Two Towers, so I assume that this scene takes place later in the trilogy. But then why wasn’t it featured in the movies?
Link -via Fashionably Geek
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I’m not a fan of The Lord of the Rings, but I have wondered how such a monumentally influential author was overlooked for a Nobel Prize in literature. C.S. Lewis nominated J.R.R. Tolkien in 1961. The governing committee considered him, but ultimately awarded the prize to the Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andric. Why? Recently declassified documents explain the committee’s reasoning:
Swedish reporter Andreas Ekström delved into 1961′s previously classified documents on their release this week, to find the jury passed over names including Lawrence Durrell, Robert Frost, Graham Greene, EM Forster and Tolkien to come up with their eventual winner, Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andri?. [...]
The prose of Tolkien – who was nominated by his friend and fellow fantasy author CS Lewis – “has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality”, wrote jury member Anders Österling. Frost, on the other hand, was dismissed because of his “advanced age” – he was 86 at the time – with the jury deciding the American poet’s years were “a fundamental obstacle, which the committee regretfully found it necessary to state”. Forster was also ruled out for his age – a consideration that no longer bothers the jury, which awarded the prize to the 87-year-old Doris Lessing in 2007 – with Österling calling the author “a shadow of his former self, with long lost spiritual health”.
Durrell, meanwhile, “gives a dubious aftertaste … because of [his] monomaniacal preoccupation with erotic complications”, while Italian novelist Alberto Moravia “suffers from … a general monotony”.
Greene, who never won the Nobel, was 1961′s runner-up, with Danish writer Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa, coming in third.
Do you agree with the Nobel committee?
Link -via blastr | Photo: Biography Channel
[Photo deleted by request of owner]
What’s most impressive is the shading of the background (assuming that’s not just back hair). The husband of Boards.ie member whoopsadaisydoodles acquired this tattoo, no doubt to impress him/her.
Link -via Geekologie
In that case, I’ll just take the Tube. Let us thank Google’s programmers for offering this prudent warning.
The map is of northern London, but you can overlay a map in your own city by choosing “The Shire” as your starting point and “Mordor” as the destination when searching for directions.
Link -via Geekosystem
In The Lord of the Rings, the Nazgûl were among the most dangerous foes our heroes encountered. Jason Ku, a mechanical engineering student at MIT, rendered a frighteningly realistic one in paper. He’s been active in the craft since the age of five and has clearly mastered it.
Link -via My Modern Met
To think that if only Henson had not died in 1990, this movie might exist. Draw R2D2, a site that invites artists to mash up two pop culture themes for a fortnight, selected the Muppets and The Lord of the Rings as source material. There’s one particularly striking one at the link by Will Robertson which shows Fozzie Bear as a brave and determined Samwise.
Link -via Nerd Bastards
Previously: LOTR Re-Enacted by Muppets
Sauron has high expectations of us, and this new guy isn’t helping our billable hours. Yeah, he’s got some innovative ideas, but he isn’t a team player. It may be time to call in an outside trainer for some community-building activities. I know a guy at Greenstorm Films — you know, the people behind the Dora the Explorer spoof — who can help.
-via The Mary Sue
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The modern bride wants one thing out of her wedding: Gollum, Gollum, and more Gollum! Really, you can’t overdo it. At a minimum, hire a guy to dress up like Gollum and serve as your ringbearer. For an upscale wedding, you need a Gollum cake, like this one by Crazy Cakes in Austin.
Link -via blastr | Crazy Cakes | Photo: Between the Pages
Benjamin Harff, a German art student, spent a year creating a copy of The Silmarillion in the tradition of medieval European illuminated manuscripts. Most of the text itself is typed, but the elaborate calligraphy is Harff’s own work. Click on the link to see some amazing works of calligraphy.
Link -via Nerdcore | Photo: Tolkien Library
Cartoonist Noelle Stevenson offers up a delicious series called The Broship of the Rings. You’ve never heard of the dwarves? It’s probably because they’re so underground. Link -via The Mary Sue
I’m having trouble tracking down the artist responsible for this piece, so if you know, let me know in the comments. Well, other Van Gogh, obviously. I’m assuming that this is not an alternate Starry Night that he painted himself. -via blastr
One would think that a basic understanding of The Lord of the Rings would be taught in journalism school — especially for future sports writers — but such is apparently not the case. The New York Times corrected their statement that a bat was named after the sword used by Bilbo Baggins. Well, good for them owning up to such an embarrassingly obvious mistake.
redditor lulalai snapped this shot this morning. It reminds me (as well as a lot of other redditors) of the Eye of Saruon presented in the LOTR movies. Do you agree?
In J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins became extravagantly wealthy by looting the treasure of the dragon Smaug (which he split with the dwarves). In today’s value, how much money was that? Forbes‘ Michael Noer ran some calculations and came up with $8 billion:
To keep the math relatively simple and to avoid complications like integrating the partial volume of a sphere, we can approximate Smaug’s bed of gold and silver to be a cone, with a radius of 9.6 feet (1/2 the diameter) and a height of 7 feet (assuming the weight of the dragon will smush down the point of the cone by about a foot).
Now we can calculate the volume of Smaug’s treasure mound:
V= 1/3 ? r2 h = 1/3 * ? * 9.62 * 7 = 675.6 cubic feet
But, obviously, the mound isn’t solid gold and silver. We know it has a “great two-handled cups” in it – one of which Bilbo steals – and probably human remains, not to mention the air space between the coins. Let’s assume that the mound is 30% air and bones. That makes the volume of the hoard that is pure gold and silver coins 472.9 cubic feet.
We know that Bilbo eventually takes his cut of the treasure in two small-chests, one filled with gold and the other filled with silver, so it seems safe to assume that the hoard is approximately ½ gold and ½ silver, or 236.4 cubic feet of each metal.
Link via Nerd Bastards | Image by deviantART user Remainaery
In Salon, Laura Miller writes about a novel by Yisroel Markov which tells the LoTR story from Mordor’s point of view. Here’s a summary of The Last Ringbearer:
In Yeskov’s retelling, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science “destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!” He’s in cahoots with the elves, who aim to become “masters of the world,” and turn Middle-earth into a “bad copy” of their magical homeland across the sea. Barad-dur, also known as the Dark Tower and Sauron’s citadel, is, by contrast, described as “that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic.”
Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Image: New Line Cinema
Peter Jackson has revealed that The Beatles approached J.R.R. Tolkien forty years ago with a request to produce a movie version of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien turned them down:
[...]John Lennon wanted to play the role of the avaricious creature Gollum and Paul McCartney was to play Frodo Baggins in a proposed ’60s Beatles movie version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy that never reached fruition. In fact, says Jackson, it was the author himself who nixed the plan. “It was something John was driving and J.R.R. Tolkien still had the film rights at that stage, but he didn’t like the idea of the Beatles doing it. So he killed it,” Jackson told the newspaper. George Harrison would have played the role that eventually went to Sir Ian McKellen, that of the wise wizard Gandalf, and Ringo Starr would have been Frodo’s devoted sidekick, Sam.
Link via blastr | Photo: Movie Chop Shop
Instructables user RavingMadStudios made a cake shaped like the Dark Tower from The Lord of the Rings. The Eye of Sauron is a cupcake. The structure is supported by cardboard tubes resting on a bundt pan.
Link via Geektoplasm
Andrea Newberry made deviled eggs that look like the eye of Sauron from The Lord of the Rings movies. The pupils are made with olives. You can read her recipe at the link.
Link via Nerdcore | Images: New Line Cinema, Forkable
Previously: Eye of Sauron, Made with Tesla Coils
Boyz N the Ring is a parody of The Lord of the Rings in which gangsta hobbits help Gandalf defeat the ambitions of Sauron. It was created by the comedy troupe Pistol Shrimps. Content warning: some foul language.
via Nerd Bastards
British artist Philip Smith is an accomplished bookbinder. Pictured above is his vision of Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings:
Book-box made from binders board, balsawood and with brass-reinforced epoxy-putty modelling. Covered with goatskin. Various parts of goatskin are used; strips, emulsified or individual flesh side and grain side parings, and maril. The box has two compartments for the book and a map folder. The leather clasp is designed to match the of images on both sides. The skull (supposedly of a Ringwrailh King; the contorted upper spires now represent the crown) is designed to work with a raking light to give deep relief to the modeling. The nine dead ringwraiths’ headstones line the lower edge of the box.
You can view more examples of his work at the link.
Link via io9 | Photo: Philip Smith
The DM of the Rings is a webcomic by Shamus Young which imagines the characters of The Lord of the Rings movies as players in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign who consistently refuse to stay in-character.
Link via John Meunier
