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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...

She has won the good opinion of countless readers with her sparklingly witty prose. And now – in something of a snub to the Bard – Jane Austen has been voted the greatest British author of all time. The Georgian-era novelist beat Shakespeare to take top spot, with 44 per cent of the vote.

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...

In a first-look profile of Amazon’s eagerly anticipated The Lord of the Rings TV series, The Rings of Power, the project’s creative team had some words about online trolls who have been outraged that the show will feature a far more diverse cast than Peter Jackson’s trilogy of films. “It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of [author J.R.R.] Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like,” executive producer Lindsey Weber told Vanity Fair, which also published several new photos from the series. “Tolkien is for everyone. His stories are about his fictional races doing their...

An IKEA employee from Scotland has fulfilled his childhood dream of building a “Hobbit House” in his back garden. Ali Hughson, 47, has been a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien since he was a teenager and loved the idea of having a Hobbit-themed workshop. Ali spent six months and 2,000 pounds (approx. US$2,800) building the 2-meter-tall shed, which even features the iconic round green door made famous in the Peter Jackson films. “When I was around 13 I read ‘The Hobbit’, and then watched ‘The Lord of the Rings’ movies when they got released,” Ali said. “I’ve been a fan of...

A historic pub in the centre of Oxford that has served students, scholars and literary greats for over 450 years is to close. The Lamb and Flag, once frequented by the likes of Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien and his friend C.S. Lewis, who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, has suffered a disastrous loss of revenues since the start of the pandemic. It first opened in 1566 and moved to its present location on St Giles, a broad thoroughfare in the city centre, in 1613. It is owned by St John’s College, one of 45 colleges and private...

Although we usually have a pretty good handle on all the different kinds of blips and blobs detected by our telescopes, it would be unwise to assume we've seen everything there is to see out there in the big, wide Universe. Case in point: a new kind of signal spotted by radio telescopes, which has astronomers scratching their heads. Four of these strange objects have been detected. All of them are circular in shape, and three are particularly bright around the edges - like a ring, or a bubble that is more opaque around the edges. An international team of...

There's something unusual lurking out in the depths of space: Astronomers have discovered four faint objects that at radio wavelengths are highly circular and brighter along their edges. And they're unlike any class of astronomical object ever seen before. The objects, which look like distant ring-shaped islands, have been dubbed odd radio circles, or ORCs, for their shape and overall peculiarity. Astronomers don't yet know exactly how far away these ORCs are, but they could be linked to distant galaxies. All objects were found away from the Milky Way's galactic plane and are around 1 arcminute across (for comparison, the...

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...

The Finnish Epic Behind Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Brian Handwerk for National Geographic News December 19, 2001 Generations of readers have cherished Middle Earth, the fantasy universe sprung from the mind of storyteller J.R.R. Tolkien. Now, his magical world has been brought to life with the premiere of the first film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring. While the author's imagination was vast, Tolkien's world and its cast of characters do have roots in real-world history and geography, from the world wars that dominated Tolkien's lifetime to the ancient language and legends of ...

MINAS TIRITH, GONDOR—Kicking off a major trade war between the two kingdoms, the Middle-Earth Trade Federation has announced heavy tariffs on the import of Narnian steel, sending the stock market into a freefall Thursday.Any steel imported from Narnia to Gondor, Rohan, Erebor, or Mirkwood will be subject to a 30% tax. The move is expected to raise the end consumer price of various imported goods significantly, according to expert economists working at Rivendell.“Trade wars are great, and they’re really easy to win,” the king of Gondor said in a dispatch via carrier pigeon. “If we keep allowing cheap Narnian steel...

IN the summer of 1916, a young Oxford academic embarked for France as a second lieutenant in the British Expeditionary Force. The Great War, as World War I was known, was only half-done, but already its industrial carnage had no parallel in European history. “Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute,” recalled J. R. R. Tolkien. “Parting from my wife,” he wrote, doubting that he would survive the trenches, “was like a death.”

124 years ago today, on January 3, 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein Africa. Forty-five years later, in 1937, his book The Hobbit, was published which he had written for his children. Together with its sequel, The Lord of the Rings, it launched generations of readers on adventures through the invented world of Middle-earth that would impact many of us for the rest of our lives.

Back on Nov. 17, Warner Bros. released the long-awaited, extended edition of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. The film adds just 20 extra minutes, but packs a lot of emotion into those minutes. By now, most of us have seen the Hobbit movies and it can probably be agreed that Peter Jackson created amazing pieces of art. However, most of us wished for more in-depth scenes or more face time for a favorite character. With the extended edition, we get both, plus two full discs of bonus features. A few scenes were extended with just a couple...

Turkish court to decide if comparing Erdogan to 'Rings' character Gollum a crime It can't be flattering to be compared to "Lord of the Rings" character Gollum, but a Turkish court is trying to determine if it is a crime. A doctor who likened President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the pasty, cave-dwelling creature is facing up to two years in prison in Turkey, where insulting the president is a crime, reports said Wednesday. Bilgin Ciftci is accused of sharing images of the two, but it is up to a court to determine whether a comparison to the muttering, gangrel creature...

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.

An important, and frankly amazing Tolkien document has emerged, recently discovered loose in a copy of The Lord of the Rings once owned by illustrator Pauline Baynes. The Guardian reports that Baynes removed the map from a previous version of the novel as she was working on a then new color map for a new edition that was published in 1970. The map then had “copious” notes made by J.R.R. Tolkien in green ink and pencil. Baynes then made her own notes on the map. It is essentially a map annotated by Tolkien himself.

Two authors who collectively have sold hundreds of millions of copies of their books decades after their deaths receive scant attention in academia. C. S. Lewis, according to Publisher’s Weekly, had sold 18 million copies by 2013. J. R. R. Tolkien, according to answers.com, has sold about 250 million copies. But try finding a panel on either of them at the Modern Language Association. Perhaps it has something to do with the outlook of this literary pair. Indeed, even during their lifetimes, despite spending most of their working lives as Oxford dons, both Lewis and Tolkien were more widely appreciated...

A just-unearthed cave formed more than 1 million years ago could yield new insight into the geological history of the American West, according to scientists, who called the discovery a major find. Four amateur cave explorers uncovered the vast caverns, stretching more than 1,000 feet into a remote mountainside, in August. Visitors to the cave, dubbed Ursa Minor, described seeing millions of crystals that shimmered like diamonds lodged in its walls. Translucent mineral curtains hung from the ceiling, and a lake possibly 20 feet deep filled one of the cave's five known rooms. Passages leading into darkness suggested there was...