Lord of the Rings
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A World Without Hope
At Salon, Gerry Canavan compares the bleakness of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to the gain and loss of hope in Star Wars: Star Wars has always been, in the EU at least, a universe more or less without hope, that only…
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You’re Such a Gollum
A man is facing two years in prison after comparing Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to the Lord of the Rings character, Gollum. However, the judge in the case isn’t sure that the comparison is really an insult: The judge adjourned…
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Walking the Road Into Mordor
A Tolkien scholar writes about how he fought off a lawsuit from the Tolkien Estate: I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself and put my research skills to work on my defense. Unfortunately, the case law was sparse. The…
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Genealogy of Hobbits and Hiawatha
Through his research for an article for the journal Tolkien Studies, John Garth believes he has discovered a surprising source text for several episodes from Middle Earth: Longfellow’s trochaic epic, “The Song of Hiawatha.” The dragon Smaug has long been…
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Gandolf Would Not Imbibe Pumpkin Spice
According to Pobst, who worked on the Xbox version of 2002′s The Fellowship of the Ring adventure game, initially there were going to be pumpkin patches in the Shire and “the Tolkien Enterprises people went nuts about it,” to the…
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Out of the Binders and Into the Refrigerators
The success of The Magicians trilogy stems in part from its self-awareness. Lev Grossman wields his familiarity with fantasy genre fiction to critique and alter the usual formula. So why do his female characters all serve the same purpose? …he’d…
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Nobody Tell Gollum About This
“Among those who bear the name of Senicianus to none grant health until he bring back the ring to the temple of Nodens.” It sounds like it comes from a fantasy novel, but it’s a real inscription regarding a real…
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THE EYEBALL: Fake Out
Rumpus blogger Rick Moody posted a comment to my recent post about Lord of the Rings asking whether the special effects of that film still held up. I got to thinking about why we accept some special effects as cool…
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The Eyeball: Lord of the Rings
Last Friday I was laid up with some kind of nasty stomach bug that left me prone most of the day. What better time than to revisit Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring? It was literally the…