Free Republic

Art From the Island of Hobbits Indonesian statue reshapes Australian gallery Reuters Nov 21, 2006 (National Gallery of Australia)CANBERRA—An Indonesian weaver and her suckling baby are reshaping Australia's national art gallery. The Bronze Weaver, a tiny 1,400 year-old Indonesian statue, has gone on exhibition at the Australian National Gallery in Canberra in an attempt to lure art-wary Australians away from traditional European masterworks and educate them in Asian forms. "With its intriguing sixth-century dating, The Bronze Weaver may be the most striking, rare and important object of Indonesian ancestral art in existence," Robyn Maxwell, the gallery's senior curator of Asian...

Santorum defends Iraq war By ALISON HAWKES Bucks County Courier Times Embattled U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum said America has avoided a second terrorist attack for five years because the “Eye of Mordor” has been drawn to Iraq instead. Santorum used the analogy from one of his favorite books, J.R.R. Tolkien's 1950s fantasy classic “Lord of the Rings,” to put an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq into terms any school kid could easily understand. “As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used...

Travel the Grand Trunk Road between Lahore and Islamabad, and you come to the city of Gujrat. Awash in the smog and sewage produced by its million-odd inhabitants, it is an unlovely place best known for the manufacture of electrical fans. It is also the location of a shrine to a 17th-century Sufi Saint by the name of Shua Dulah. For at least 100 years, but perhaps for centuries, it has been, though is no longer, a depository for children with microcephaly. The word "microcephaly" comes from the Greek, "small head". But in Pakistan, such children are known as chuas...

Ancient islanders get a leg up Bruce Bower From San Juan, Puerto Rico, at the Paleoanthropology Society and Society for American Archaeology meeting Fossils of a humanlike species dubbed Homo floresiensis that lived on the Pacific island of Flores between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago recently grabbed headlines because scientists deduced that this creature stood no more than 1 meter tall and possessed a surprisingly small brain. Nonetheless, H. floresiensis packed considerable weight on its diminutive frame and possessed far stronger legs than people do today, says William L. Jungers of the State University of New York at Stony Brook....

Rarely have the title and tone of a missive clashed so directly as in this DUmmie THREAD "victoriously" titled, "We are winning! Keep up the good fight! BUSHCO is going down..." To read the title, one would think the DUmmies are on the verge of finally defeating the EVIL Bush Regime. However, when one actually READS the thread itself, it is chock full of ANGRY defeatism. Yeah, DUmmies, you can all relax. You ARE winning...NOT! Even you DUmmies are not at all convinced by the "upbeat" title of the thread. Once again the "victorious" DUmmie rantings are in a...

Hobbits may be earliest Australians Carmelo Amalfi and Leigh Dayton December 08, 2005 THE tiny hobbit-like humans of Indonesia may have lived in Australia before they became extinct about 11,000 years ago. The startling claim comes from archaeologist Mike Morwood, leader of the team that in 2003 uncovered remains of the 1m-tall hominid at Liang Bua cave on Indonesia's Flores island. They believe the pint-size person - known officially as Homo floresiensis and unofficially as the "Hobbit" - was wiped out by a volcanic eruption that spared their Homo sapiens neighbours. Speaking at a public lecture in Perth, Professor Morwood...

Bones of ContentionIs a small, 18,000-year-old skeleton the older cousin of modern-day Pygmies—or a new human species? BY SIMON ELEGANT | RAMPASASA JOHN STANMEYER FOR TIMESMALL WORLD: Rampasasa resident Anggalus Jalur, 55, stands just 130 cm tall "In those days we ate our meat raw, like animals." The speaker is Viktor Jurubu, an Indonesian farmer in his 60s, who, in his T shirt and sarong, looks little like the cavemen he's describing. Except for his height, which is about 140 cm. In the world of anthropology, Jurubu's small size is big news because he and his 246 fellow villagers of...

The discovery of a new species of human astounded the world. But is it what it seems? John Vidal went to remotest Flores to find out If you want to understand human evolution, it may be worth starting with Johannes Daak from the remote village of Akel in the heavily forested centre of the Indonesian island of Flores. Johannes, from the Manggarai ethnic group, reckons he is 100 years old and says he owes his longevity and enduring strength to having only ever known one woman. He says he owes his stature to his ancestors. Johannes is no more than...

Pied Piper Pitt, aka William RIVERS Pitt, after having his promise of something WONDERFUL happening on Monday (after the snow dog ate his homework last week) go up in smoke, is now trying to change the subject and cheer on the DUmmies with a dopey pep talk as we can see in this Dummie THREAD titled, “This is a great time to be alive.” This posting follows on the heels of a dopey story that Pied Piper Pitt posted yesterday about some guy who is a milkman who tries to be a dogcatcher (or was it the other way...

In an astonishing discovery that could rewrite the history of human evolution, scientists say they have found the skeleton of a new human species, a dwarf, marooned for eons in a tropical Lost World while modern man rapidly colonized the rest of the planet. Chris Stringer, director of human origins studies at the Natural History Museum in London, holds a cast taken from a skull that is said to be that of a new species in the evolution of humans named Flores Man. Richard Lewis, Associated Press Chris Stringer, director of human origins studies at the Natural History Museum in...

Scientists in Australia have found a new species of hobbit-sized humans who lived about 18,000 years ago on an Indonesian island in a discovery that adds another piece to the complex puzzle of human evolution. The partial skeleton of Homo floresiensis, found in a cave on the island of Flores, is of an adult female that was a metre (3 feet) tall, had a chimpanzee-sized brain and was substantially different from modern humans. It shared the isolated island to the east of Java with miniature elephants and Komodo dragons. The creature walked upright, probably evolved into its dwarf size because...

SEAN Penn and Billy Crystal made minor news with political comments at Sunday night's Oscars. But the real headline went unnoticed: Hollywood now agrees with President Bush that "outsourcing" American investment and jobs can be a good thing. This year's big winner, "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King," shows - better than any economist could - how Americans gain when our companies invest and create jobs all over the world. Financing for "King" came from New Line Cinema, a unit of New York-based Time Warner Inc. By the standards of some political and economic analysis these days, New...

I just saw on Japanese TV a possible freeper with the sign "EVEN HOBBITS SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!" I almost broke my kotatsu!

An epic end to this ode to heroism and sacrifice. Superb special effects, thrilling battle scenes -- especially of the Nazgul wheeling and diving on Minas Tirith like JU-87 Stukas -- chilling moments as Shelob hunts Frodo, and a message of courage and hope: that even the smallest of us can make a difference in the history of world. My main quibble was Jackson’s removal of the “Scouring of the Shire” (and indeed any scene of Saruman). It’s always been one of my favorite parts of the book, the Shire has been reduced under Saruman’s brand of Socialism to a...

The Encyclopedia of ArdaAn excellent online Middle Earth reference guide.

Who has the best prices in-store? Tell us!

Butterbeer & HobbitsMeriadoc Brandybuck and Peregrin Took: Tolkien's oft Overlooked Heroes by Jacqueline O. Moleski  Frodo Baggins and his servant Samwise Gamgee have been the focus of many articles, essays and even books. However, as awesome as those two Hobbits are; there are two other Hobbits in the tale of The Lord of the Rings who have often been overlooked by fans and critics alike. Peter Jackson, however, has realized and visualized these two important characters perfectly. The focus of this essay is the characters of Merry and Pippin and how these two young Hobbits emerge as heroes in their...

Charting the Shire linesWhat was so special about the year 1601 that it should be when Hobbits needed to settle in a new home? And where, exactly, did they settle?People often ask a lot of questions about the early years of the Shire which are really hard to answer. For example, did Marcho and Blanco, the Fallohide brothers who led the first wave of migration into the Shire, have a surname? When did surnames become important to the Hobbits? How much do the surnames recorded in The Lord of the Rings reflect the social structure of early Shire clans?If there...

"The Empty Lands Where No Men Are..."The People of Eriador, 2000 - 3017 Third AgeThis article discusses the desolate picture of settlement in Eriador at the time of the War of the Ring. In the early Third Age Eriador had been chiefly inhabited by the Elves of Lindon, the Dwarves of Khadzad-dum and the People of Arnor. Arnor was stricken by internal strife 861+, war with Angmar 1300+, and the Great Plague of 1636, in which "...many parts of Eriador become desolate." (LOTR Tale of Years 1636). In 1974 Arnor was conquered by Angmar and its remaining city (Fornost Erain)...

The grandson of J R R Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings books, has spoken for the first time of the family feud that has seen him excluded from managing the writer's literary estate. In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph today, Simon Tolkien speaks about the five-year dispute and how his father, Christopher, has turned his back on him and his children. He also discloses how a minor disagreement over the Hollywood adaptations of the books contributed to his exclusion from the board of the family firm. He said: "My father is very angry with me...