Happy 121st Birthday J.R.R. Tolkien!

If you pay attention this blog, you will know from a previous post, that I am a huge J.R.R. Tolkien fan! Ok not one of those over-the-top read all of the annotated versions and all  of the previously unpublished ones, but I love his Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit: or There and Back Again. I have tried to read The Silmarillion three times but end up stopping each time because it is one of those books, though intriguing, that is so dense that you really need to be in an insanely quiet space with no distractions in order to read. It is very much like reading an Icelandic saga like this one, or that passage in the Bible that reads like “so and so begat so and so who begat that guy who begat that other guy.” Plus you almost need a guide to the characters to remember who everyone is. I would like to read more of his works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Children of Hurin (one of his unfinished books that was edited and finished by his son Christopher Tolkien I believe). The librarian in me was fascinated by this article, which I found on The Tolkien Society website. I also enjoyed the Library Events page, which featured information on how to do a Tolkien Reading Day at the library. For those interested, the Tolkien Society (based in the UK) will be having their annual conference March 1-3, 2013 at Valparaiso University in Indiana, which looks pretty cool in my opinion.

And yes, I was a huge fan of the Lord of the Rings [LOTR] trilogy films and have all the extended editions and was quite miffed when they left Tom Bombadil out of them. I was so obsessed with the movies when they came out in the theaters. I saw the first and/or second one like six times because we knew the people who owned the local theater and went there all the time to watch it. And of course, when I was in Scotland, they came out with Return of the King and went to see it in the tiny local theater in town (it was absolutely packed and I was sitting in the upper balcony). I still have the souvenir cups from Woolworths. As I’m sure pretty much everyone knows, The Hobbit came out in theaters in the US on December 14 and I haven’t seen it yet (ah the joys of life with a toddler and no money). My parents already saw it and told me that “they dragged it out a lot, but there was plenty of gore and fighting in it”. I guess they would have to as they are now making into three movies, to which I say “Really, what the hell for?!?”  I mean the book is really slim, it’s not ridiculously long like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (and no they shouldn’t have made Twilight: Breaking Dawn into two movies either). So the answer is probably to annoy fans and to make as much money as possible as the film had so many problems in the beginning, it is a miracle that it got made at all (and I was actually excited that Guillermo del Toro was to be the director as I love his work, but Peter Jackson obviously knows what he is doing too). Anyways, I found this interview with some of the cast members today while researching this post. And since I loved Howard Shore’s scores so much from the LOTR films, I found this article interesting as well. I also found the Middle-earth Recipes and its accompanying blog to be a fun read too.

So let’s raise a glass to “The Professor”!

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