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[Jacob]

A bang-up by the marketing department. :lol

 

[Adam J.]

That poster makes me smile.

 

[Demoncarnotaur]

I like how theres the one normal looking dude at the top looking totally out of place

Oh come on, don't be ridicu-

- oh.

:lol


I think thats on purpose though, it kinda sells the fun side of the movie.

 

[methodman]

lol, hilarious stuff

 

[Pkaz01]

Which one is the one with the food in his mouth? favorite confirmed.

That would be Bombur

thanks!

 

[Gila]

Which one is the one with the food in his mouth? favorite confirmed.

That would be Bombur

I'm sensing he's likely to have quite a bit of scenes with food

 

[lastplayed]

Reminds me of Andriel from the War in the North game.

 

[Edmond Dantès]

http://breathingsboring.tumblr.com/image/32427543512

Bargain.

 

[jaxword]

*sigh* they look so cartoony. It's like a Dreamworks animated film or something

Reminder that

1. The Hobbit is a children's story.
2. A dozen+ dwarves as your main characters is already inherently cartoony.

 

[Edmond Dantès]

Reminder that

1. The Hobbit is a children's story.
2. A dozen+ dwarves as your main characters is already inherently cartoony.

Not in Tolkien's mind it wasn't.

"The Hobbit" wasn't written for children, and it certainly wasn't done just for the amusement of Tolkien's three sons and one daughter, as is generally reported. "That's all sob stuff. No, of course, I didn't. If you're a youngish man and you don't want to be made fun of, you say you're writing for children. At any rate, children are your immediate audience and you write or tell them stories, for which they are mildly grateful: long rambling stories at bedtime.

"'The Hobbit' was written in what I should now regard as bad style, as if one were talking to children. There's nothing my children loathed more. They taught me a lesson. Anything that in any way marked out 'The Hobbit' as for children instead of just for people, they disliked-instinctively. I did too, now that I think about it. All this 'I won't tell you any more, you think about it' stuff. Oh no, they loathe it; it's awful.

 

[Felix Lighter]

I would have loved to read Tolkien's The Hobbit remake, not as a replacement of the original, which will always be wonderful, but as a more fleshed out alternative that better ties into the Lord of the Rings.

 

[Platy]

Oh come on, don't be ridicu-

- oh.

Best poster ever confirmed

 

[Platy]

Double post because it is not everyday that a poster gets a fanart, specialy so fast

 

[MrCheez]

SO awesome

This group of characters definitely lends itself well to amusing fanart portrayals.. can't wait to see more!

 

[maquiladora]

That is great.

 

[Edmond Dantès]

Old, but still amusing.

The Lord of the Wilhelm Screams

You'll never be able to view the Fellowship prologue in the same way again.


I wonder how many we'll hear in The Hobbit trilogy.

 

[Epix]

So are we any closer to knowing how and where we can see this in 48fps/3D when it releases?

 

[Edmond Dantès]

So are we any closer to knowing how and where we can see this in 48fps/3D when it releases?

Not any closer I'm afraid. We should know in November.



New scroll:

 

[SiegfriedFM]

Oh Bombur, you so fat.

Still looks great. Except Kili. Goddammit. Unless that silly proposed Smaug idea is real, Kili is the most annoying design choice.

 

[jaxword]

Double post because it is not everyday that a poster gets a fanart, specialy so fast

Note that they inserted Bilbo into that conspicuously blank spot on the main movie poster. Hm.

 

[Rootbeer]

Gandalf once again showing his love for the halfling's leaf.

Hiiigh as a mufa

Dwarves stay remarkably well-groomed considering they are on the road for weeks and weeks on end

Can't get over Thorin's small nose. So undwarflike. Oh Kili I can kind of accept it since he's supposed to be so young.

 

[raphier]

I think Kili And Thorin look more human because we are supposed to relate to them the most of the dwarves.

 

[Edmond Dantès]

Gandalf's smoke trail looks like a dragon.

 

[Number45]

Empire have something in store for their October cover.

So...

I have a digital sub to Empire, so I'll try and transcribe what's in there when it unlocks on Thursday.

No sign of the new Empire issue yet.

Empire sub has finally landed, downloading now. Way too much Arnie on the cover!

Still reading The Silmarillion.

... just realised that image is for NEXT month.

 

[Edmond Dantès]

So...







... just realised that image is for NEXT month.

Yeah, my mistake as well.


On the topic of The Silmarillion. Have you reached Tolkien's beloved Beren and Luthien tale?

If so, you may remember this part:

 

[Starsunder]

Dwarf poster is amazing.

 

[Number45]

Yeah, my mistake as well.


On the topic of The Silmarillion. Have you reached Tolkien's beloved Beren and Luthien tale?

If so, you may remember this part:

Not yet, I've just passed the part where Eol is executed in Gondolin (Kindle says I'm about a third of the way through). I'm enjoying it, although I have to admit that I glaze over when it starts to get geographical (so many names of places) - I wonder if anyone has ever tried to map based on the book?

I do get a little thrill when I see things mentioned from LOTR though. Minas Tirith (although it seems to be in the north here, and I thought it was in the south? Probably my memory... which is bad since I only re-read LOTR a few months back), Sauron, Elrond and Galadriel are the only things that really spring to mind at the moment. I had assumed Ungoliant was Shelob, but I assume that she's one of her descendants.

 

[Edmond Dantès]

Not yet, I've just passed the part where Eol is executed in Gondolin (Kindle says I'm about a third of the way through). I'm enjoying it, although I have to admit that I glaze over when it starts to get geographical (so many names of places) - I wonder if anyone has ever tried to map based on the book?

I do get a little thrill when I see things mentioned from LOTR though. Minas Tirith (although it seems to be in the north here, and I thought it was in the south? Probably my memory... which is bad since I only re-read LOTR a few months back), Sauron, Elrond and Galadriel are the only things that really spring to mind at the moment. I had assumed Ungoliant was Shelob, but I assume that she's one of her descendants.

That was a different Minas Tirith. Ungoliant is the Mother of all spiders in Arda.

This map may be useful.

Also, this is a good depiction of Ungoliant.

 

[Edmond Dantès]

Tauriel review.

http://www.preternia.com/2012/09/25/the-hobbit-tauriel-6-review-gallery/

 

[strafer]

Plastic knees.

Would not smang.

 

[Felix Lighter]

Dwalin's hammer on that scroll looks fantastic. I think I'm going to like his Dwarf killing machine character.

 

[Ogni-XR21]

Dwarves stay remarkably well-groomed considering they are on the road for weeks and weeks on end

That's what feels off to me... it makes it look much more hollywood-like compared to the LOTR triology.

 

[StealthGoblin]

Bets on the least memorable/least emphasized Dwarf in the trilogy?

I reckon Oin.

Gloin is Gimli's dad.
Fili and Kili because of events in the book.
Bifur Bofur and Bombur will be comedy.
Balin because his tomb featured in LOTR and it'll make a link between the two trilogies.
Dwalin because he'll be the killing machine.
Thorin because he's the leader.
Nori, Dori and Ori all have something interesting about them.

Oin just looks so plain and a by the numbers Dwarf.

 

[LaserBuddha]

Tauriel review.

http://www.preternia.com/2012/09/25...[url][/QUOTE] The dorf is a little tall, no?

 

[Napalm_Frank]

Bets on the least memorable/least emphasized Dwarf in the trilogy?

I reckon Oin.

I'd bet on Oin too but I'll pick Nori.

 

[xenist]

That was a different Minas Tirith. Ungoliant is the Mother of all spiders in Arda.

This map may be useful.

To put this into perspective almost all of this is underwater at the time of The Hobbit and LOTR. All of it takes place east of the Blue Mountains which are at the eastern-most part of the map except for the parts in the Grey Havens. This whole land was destroyed during the War Of Wrath when the Hosts of the Valar came to smash Morgoth.

 

[bengraven]

You know what.

I'm up for a complete Middle-Earth read through at some point after the Hobbit film comes out.

We already have a Hobbit re-read thread I believe, but after the film and book I think we could continue on through LOTR. Or do Sil, Hobbit, and LOTR for those who are willing.

I myself am getting more and more excited for a ME re-read at some point. I think I might do this around December:

1) Silmarillion up until the birth of Turin
2) Turin and Hurin
3) finish Sil
4) Hobbit
5) LOTR

 

[Edmond Dantès]

You know what.

I'm up for a complete Middle-Earth read through at some point after the Hobbit film comes out.

We already have a Hobbit re-read thread I believe, but after the film and book I think we could continue on through LOTR. Or do Sil, Hobbit, and LOTR for those who are willing.

I myself am getting more and more excited for a ME re-read at some point. I think I might do this around December:

1) Silmarillion up until the birth of Turin
2) Turin and Hurin
3) finish Sil
4) Hobbit
5) LOTR

The Book of Lost Tales is also worth reading before The Silmarillion and the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth.

 

[injurai]

I need this movie now!!!!

 

[fallout]

Old, but still amusing.

The Lord of the Wilhelm Screams

You'll never be able to view the Fellowship prologue in the same way again.


I wonder how many we'll hear in The Hobbit trilogy.

I really dislike these. I find them pretty distracting in any movie that they show up in.

 

[DodgerSan]

I really dislike these. I find them pretty distracting in any movie that they show up in.

Likewise. They used to be a cool little easter egg for people who recognised them, but they are massively overused now, and take you out of the moment when they occur. Directors should realise they aren't 'cool' any more.

 

[Monocle]

Not any closer I'm afraid. We should know in November.



New scroll:

Every character looks great, except for Kili, who appears to be a close relative of Aragorn. Very incongruous next to the rest of the cast.

 

[womp]

Plastic knees.

Would not smang.

Would not smaug.

 

[Edmond Dantès]

The Hobbit unearths a hoard of myths

'The Hobbit' provides England with the mythology it has lost. Always, even in Tolkien’s most trivial tales, there are hints of forgotten roots

The tale of The Hobbit will survive the film (with Billy Connolly as a dwarf warrior and Stephen Fry as the mayor of Lake-town) in the same way that the Iliad survived the film Troy (with Brad Pitt as Achilles). For The Hobbit, published 75 years ago, is not a fantasy-adventure as it is being described, but a myth, or part of a mythology.

J R R Tolkien’s telling of The Hobbit in 1937 was just one way that the story could have been told. Its narration is quite different from that of The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit is joky, domestic and aimed at children. Tolkien happily illustrated it himself, unlike his more serious work, and the mysterious runes on the dustjacket are simply a transliteration of the English: “The Hobbit or There and Back Again, being the record of a year’s journey made by Bilbo Baggins…”

Peter Jackson’s film trilogy of The Hobbit – the first a royal performance in December – will iron out some of these differences. Film is only another form of story-telling. If you don’t like Tolkien’s prose (as many do not), then rewrite it in Latin hexameters if you wish. Someone once did that to Milton’s Paradise Lost in the vain hope of improving it.
People such as Billy Connolly find Tolkien “unreadable”, as he says, because they suppose it to be a fantasy of the dungeons and dragons genre. Tolkien’s aim was immeasurably higher – to provide England with the mythology it had lost. He may have been no great stylist (though his high, biblical register in The Lord of the Rings is often inattentively read, as attempts to parody it demonstrate). But he was an astonishing mythopoeist.

Tolkien’s starting point was the same as that of the Grimm brothers, whose work is in vogue once more: language. The Hobbit falls in the genre called Märchen, house-tales, or, in the misleading English translation, fairy tales. But it began with a word, Hobbit, for which Tolkien had to find an origin. For him, origins of words went to the mythic roots of the people who used them, even when those people were imaginary.

As the most learned of Tolkien critics, the Anglo-Saxonist Tom Shippey, has argued, Tolkien, knowing that English mythology had soaked into the earth without trace after the Norman conquest, sought to make one from scratch. He would dignify his ancestors from the West Midlands with as proud a mythology as the Greeks had in Homer and Hesiod.

Always, even in Tolkien’s most trivial tales, there are hints of forgotten roots. So, for those in the know, Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug in the new film will be a cousin of Andy Serkis as Gollum. Let me explain.

Smaug is the dragon, guarding a hoard of treasure, whose defeat is the quest of the Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, and his 13 dwarf companions. His name is the past tense of an Old Norse word smjúga meaning “to creep through an opening”. Gollum’s real name had been Smeagol (a word that might have existed in Old English), meaning “apt to creep into a hole”.

This is to simplify matters, for Tolkien declared that the English spoken by Hobbits and Men in his tales, and the Old English spoken in them by the men of Rohan, are mere translations of variants of the Common Speech of Middle Earth. This entertains only those who enjoy dictionaries, so I’ll say no more about it, except to note that Smeagol (Gollum) was in the Common Speech actually Trahand and Smaug was the related word Trägu.

Such philological complication comes from Tolkien’s attempt to construct a complete alternative world, his life’s work. This myth-making, he described by a technical term: sub-creation. Normally, sub-creation of myths is an anonymous task achieved by a culture with a shared language. Yet elements in some myths made Tolkien uneasy.

One was a tendency in heroic tales of the Germanic family of languages (English, German, Norse) to prize unhappy endings. So in the poem celebrating the Battle of Maldon in 991, the goodies, their hearts growing stouter as their bodies weaken, die at the hands of the pagan Vikings. They were morally laudable, but in the Norse myths to which Wagner looked, the outlook for men and gods was “universal final defeat”. That contradicted Tolkien’s underlying Christian optimism.

Tolkien invented another term to express an element opposed to Norse pessimism – eucatastrophe, “the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears”. The joy was from “beyond the walls of the world”. It is not exactly a happy ending, for Tolkien’s myths never end. Bilbo, like Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, is saved by an unlooked-for eucatastrophe just as he faces “the end of all things”. But he does not live happily ever after. The elves too pass away from the world, and the Hobbits’ Shire will dwindle into the unlovable West Midlands.

But in his essay On Fairy Stories, published just after The Hobbit, Tolkien declared: “The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation.” That was a myth which, in Tolkien’s eyes, had become historical reality.

His own myths belonged only to a sub-created world, but The Hobbit is as thoroughly part of that world as Tolkien could make it. It is not merely dressed up as myth – like Harry Potter, a school story with mythic elements bolted on. No, the world of The Hobbit will endure long after Stephen Fry has ceased to be a national treasure guarded by the dragon of celebrity.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9575599/The-Hobbit-unearths-a-hoard-of-myths.html

 

[Edmond Dantès]

Jerry Vanderstelt to release new art work

“Hello fellow Middle Earth fans, Jerry VanderStelt here. As some of you know, I am a Licensed artist with New Line Cinema and Warner Brothers studios in the creation of the Lord of the Rings art reproductions. Now, I have expanded my fine art program to include The Hobbit!

My first Hobbit art piece is a montage that encapsulates key moments, characters and locations seen in the first film. After that, I plan to continue exploring new pieces that focus on either beautiful landscape scenery, character-centric pieces, or specific characters or groups of characters in various environments.

I hope to have my first Hobbit piece out of the gate by the Dec.14 in time for the film’s release. Soon, I’ll be announcing the pricing and sizing as well as the different edition options I plan to offer here in this thread. Feel free to ask any questions that may come up as we go along!”

http://www.vandersteltstudio.com/

Previous examples.

 

[Starsunder]

You know what.

I'm up for a complete Middle-Earth read through at some point after the Hobbit film comes out.

We already have a Hobbit re-read thread I believe, but after the film and book I think we could continue on through LOTR. Or do Sil, Hobbit, and LOTR for those who are willing.

I myself am getting more and more excited for a ME re-read at some point. I think I might do this around December:

1) Silmarillion up until the birth of Turin
2) Turin and Hurin
3) finish Sil
4) Hobbit
5) LOTR

Oh yeah I'm fucking down with that. I own Hobbit, LOTR and Sil. I'll tackle all three if the Gaf re-read happens.

 

[Edmond Dantès]

Oh yeah I'm fucking down with that. I own Hobbit, LOTR and Sil. I'll tackle all three if the Gaf re-read happens.

That would be an epic read indeed. The whole history of Arda right there, give or take.

 

[maquiladora]

You know what.

I'm up for a complete Middle-Earth read through at some point after the Hobbit film comes out.

We already have a Hobbit re-read thread I believe, but after the film and book I think we could continue on through LOTR. Or do Sil, Hobbit, and LOTR for those who are willing.

I myself am getting more and more excited for a ME re-read at some point. I think I might do this around December:

1) Silmarillion up until the birth of Turin
2) Turin and Hurin
3) finish Sil
4) Hobbit
5) LOTR

Why not make it a real challenge and add...

 

[Edmond Dantès]

Why not make it a real challenge and add...

I'd add the Parma Eldalamberon to that.

All 20 issues.

 

[Edmond Dantès]

Also, Bored of the Rings.

Synopsis:

The parody generally follows the outline of The Lord of the Rings, including the preface, the prologue, poetry, and songs, while making light of what Tolkien made serious (e.g., "He would have finished him off then and there, but pity stayed his hand. It's a pity I've run out of bullets, he thought, as he went back up the tunnel..."). Names and words in the various languages are parodied with brand names which mimic their sounds (for example, Moxie and Pepsi replace Merry and Pippin). There are many topical references, including once-popular brand names. It has the distinction for a parody of having been continuously in print since it was first published.

Featuring the likes of Dildo Bugger of Bag Eye, Frito Bugger, Goodgulf Greyteeth, Spam Gangree, Moxie Dingleberry, Pepsi Dingleberry, Bromosel, Legolam, Gimlet, son of Groin, Arrowroot, son of Arrowshirt, heir of Barbasol and king of Minas Troney and Sorhed, the evil wizard, ruler of Fordor.