Here's a Throwback Thursday pic- from my trip to New Zealand 16 years ago. We had our annual LOTR viewing over the holidays and it prompted me to pul out my old Location Guidebook for the movies. I don't think this particular locale was used in the movies, though there were certainly similar terrain in some scenes, notably where the Fellowship is first set upon by crebain from Dunland. According to my guidebook, though, that scene was filmed in Kahurangi National Park, near Mt Olympus. My photo was taken, if memory serves, at a place called Kura Tawhiti. Now with Google Maps I can actually look this stuff up.

It's also relevant because we have some concrete news about the Amazon Middle-Earth show, which is now confirmed to be set in the Second Age and deals with the rise of Sauron. Looking forward to that. The early days of this blog were very focused on LOTR stuff, as were the early years of my life. 

I remember what I was going to say now! Sometimes you flag something in your head for a blog post and then forget all about it. But I read this:

I love concept art and this was packaged really nicely- kind of a fake leathery tome look. It even has Thorin's map inside complete with glow-in-the-dark moon runes! And the contract Bilbo signs in the back. And lots and lots of pictures of dwarves! Dwarfs. However Tolkien spelled a plurality of dwarven people.
Best part- there's a couple of pages devoted to something called the High Fells, a tomb where men of old had buried the corpses of the Nazgûl when their mortal bodies died. An inaccessible and forbidding place, and Gandalf and Radagast go there in search of, well, answers. Everyone's searching for answers, right? Though if I was Gandalf I would've brought Bilbo and Smaug with me rather than Radagast. Little Sherlock humour there, never mind me.
A little hint at something to look forward to in The Desolation of Smaug, anyway. The High Fells, I mean, not Sherlock humour.

I've been stuck in a Hobbit reverie for days now. At supper Michelle and Pallas were apparently counting to ten in spanish and they asked me how they did and I was like, "Uh, sorry, I wasn't really paying attention. I was in Middle-earth." But uno dos tres they did it perfectly the second time around.

A Twitter discussion led me to go get my copy of Unfinished Tales, a book I've had nearly as long as The Hobbit. I got it from my Grandpa's store, which was (it's still around, actually, my Grandma still runs it) a health food/ insurance agency/ Christian bookstore. When I saw this book I was so excited, expecting another tome of high adventure, though little ten-year-old me was sorely disappointed as it was nearly impenetrable. It's kind of got the same vibe as The Silmarillion (which I finally did read while tramping around New Zealand) though it is more just scraps and stuff covering all three ages of Middle-earth.
One of the briefer sections is an account by Gandalf of how he came to be part of the Dwarven company and why he convinced Thorin to recruit Bilbo Baggins. I thought there might be a little back-story for Thorin regarding the name Oakenshield. If you haven't seen the movie yet I won't say anything more, but I just wanted to see if there was a Tolkien provenance for what was shown onscreen. Well, it wasn't here but there was a brief mention of the orc Azog so that was cool.
Yeah, all this info is freely available on the internet but sometimes it's fun to pull a book off your bookshelf and look it up yourself. I knew I saved that book for a reason!

It was 29 years ago this Christmas that my Grandma gave me that copy of The Hobbit, with hundreds of stills and sketches from the Rankin/Bass animated feature that came out in the late 70s or early 80s. It pretty much changed my life forever. Not to put too fine a point on it. I was already a Star Wars nerd but the thing about my generation is that we didn't have the ability to watch our favourite movies whenever we felt like. The VCR was still a couple years away, at least in my house. So the only thing a nerdling could do was read books. (And comics, of course.) I even memorized the poem Sam tells Strider and the other hobbits when they're camping out by the stone trolls- the one that starts "Troll sat alone on his seat of stone/ and munched and mumbled a bare old bone/ for many a year he had gnawed it near..."
After the Lord of the Rings movies came out I could pretty much die happy. Though I had the better idea of going to New Zealand and visiting some of the sites where scenes were shot. Like Hobbiton:



So all I really wanted was for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey to be at least as awesome as this:



It was! And so much more. Especially since Sherlock and Watson are such key elements (though Benedict Cumberbatch doesn't have anything to do with this first movie).
We saw the 3D but not IMAX. As far as Frames Per Second goes, I don't really know what we had. Michelle asked me if it was the 48 FPS and I told her I only counted 36.

More New Zealand herald stuff: Lord of the Rings technology being used in hospitals. I thought maybe rings of power but actually it's more digital in nature.
Just yesterday I mentioned how promising it is that a pod of blue whales was seen so far north (for the first time in 50 years actually) and then today comes news of an oil spill that affects 60 orcas, some of whom swam through it.

Most . . . Illogical



So Spock was actually an elf from Rivendell? Who knew? I certainly didn't, until I rented Ringers: Lord of the Fans, which is a funny little documentary about LotR and Rings fans, narrated by Dominic Monaghan, that hobbit from Lost.
To make up for searing your eyes with that misbegotten horror, I present to you some of the beautiful sketch cards Otis Frampton made for NewLine.
Reminds me I still have to read Children of Hurin- and speaking of which, here is a beautiful pencil sketch of Fëanor.
And, completely unrelated, did you hear about the polar bear who was found wandering around 300 kms south of where polar bears normally hang out? Maybe she was the mother of that grizz/polar hybrid and was looking for her old paramour.

Greymouth
I like glaciers. They are cool. You could probably even say I love glaciers. There are two on the west coast of the South Island of note, the Fox and the Franz Joseph. To be honest, they are not all that impressive compared to the glaciers of the Rockies or Alaska, but what makes them kind of unique to my experience is you drive through a coastal rainforest to get to them- with giant ferns looking just like palm trees. Since it was raining and muddy, gabrielle left me to my own devices to explore Fox, but gamely came with to see the bigger Franz Joseph. This is a big deal since gabrielle is mortally opposed to anything icy and cold. Whereas I am completely in my element, what with polar bear sensibilities and all. "Peter Jackson didn't use any glaciers in LOTR," she grumbled good-naturedly, illustrating yet another reason why she shouldn't be expected to explore these magnificent relics of a departed Age of Ice. "Yes he did," I replied. "Didn't he use these for the Shire? No? Well, I think he used time-lapse photography to record the flow of the glacier, and then digitally turned it red and used it for Mt Doom's lava." But she didn't buy it.

Hobbiton
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
Today we swam with hobbits! Oh no wait, umm, today we saw the location of the movie set for Hobbiton and Bag End. It was actually really cool even though most of the set has been restored to its original location- there are still some hobbit holes left, sans doors or decorations, but the party tree and the lake are there and lots of sheep. So many sheep. No actual hobbits, though. Or dolphins. Or bears. And we were actually in the town of Matamata, which has embraced the hobbit theme wholeheartedly- there is even a Hobbit Hole Internet Caffe (sic), though I am not there at the moment- I was too tall to enter.
I was expecting a much cheesier tour but I was pleased with how professional they are and interesting. And I was surprised by how green it was- I thought they enhanced that in the movies, but it really was tat green, and it's not even summer yet. I took loads of pictures, probably more than most people would ever care to see, but I can't upload them today, so stay tuned.
Here is an interesting fact I learned from the Silmarillion last night- the dwarves were created by the Valar Aule, and Illuvatar could have ordered Aule to destroy them but he was merciful and let them live. There's more to the story but I have to get going for now.

I am admiring my new Warg and Orc right now. The orc is perched atop the Warg, menacingly glaring down at Frodo in the Mordor corner of the Woodsy Crypt. Treebeard is standing nearby, ready to squish the not-so-little orc if things get out of hand.
Did anyone read Elfquest back in the day? It was one of my favorite comics. I have the whole set of the original (actually they were the Epic/Marvel color reprints of the original) series. That was about a tribe of Elves, the Wolfriders, who were burned out of their home and went across the desert to meet other elves, and then went on a quest to find all the other elves out there in the wide world. Wolfriders. Warg riders. Quite different, actually. One of the Wolfrider chiefs was named Bearclaw, so obviously he was pretty cool, though he only appeared in flashback, being dead and all. (I have refrained from mentioning this to you, gabrielle, despite your elven obsession, because I don't think you would really care as much about these- they are not very Haldiry, really. But if you want to see, just let me know).
One of my other favorite comics back then was a mini-series called Longshot, about a guy who was lucky. As long as he kept his motives pure. That lesson really resonated with me- I always try to keep my motives pure. Not that I necessarily believe in luck. But I was thinking about motive today. Specifically, what motivates you to create? I think some people have the wrong motive- they want money or acclaim. But I don't know if you can produce something beautiful, however you define beauty, with such motives. Beauty, much more than luck, has to stem from pure motives.
I watched a movie that was sort of about that tonight, and also a perfect example of what I'm talking about- Moulin Rouge. (My excuse for not having seen it ere now- I was in Tibet when it came out.) The movie itself is absolutely beautiful, astonishing and thrilling. Seriously. And of course, it is about Truth and Beauty and Freedom and Love.
All the things that a Warg-rider is opposed to, in fact. Kind of funny, that.

In Appendix B of The Lord of the Rings, there is a timeline called the Tale of Years, which details the chronology of the Westlands, especially of the War of the Ring. The very last entry is in 1541 Shire Reckoning, or 122 years after Aragorn's coronation. Here is the entry in full:

"In this year on March 1st came at last the Passing of King Elessar. It is said that the beds of Meriadoc and Peregrin were set beside the bed of the great king. Then Legolas built a grey ship in Ithilien, and sailed down Anduin and so over Sea; and with him, it is said, went Gimli the Dwarf. And when that ship passed an end was come in Middle-earth of the Fellowship of the Ring."

What happens after that is a bit of a mystery, but I think I can fill in a few blanks.
Gimli and Legolas must have landed in Iceland at some point, and become vikings. Then they sailed over to Newfoundland and settled in L'Anse aux Meadows for a while, and then they hitch-hiked east to the Prairies, settling at last on the shores of Lake Winnipeg and founding a village which they named after Gimli. Maybe Legolas was too humble or perhaps Gimli too proud, but either way it is the Dwarf's name, and not Leggy's, which adorns the town to this day.
And then they put up a little mini-Argonath, perhaps in memory of King Elessar. Or maybe they watched Ralph Bakshi's version of LOTR and decided to commemorate Boromir.

Bingo Baggins
I started reading The Return of the Shadow: The History of The Lord of the Rings today. It's basically a look at all the manuscipts and changes and revisions Tolkien made en route to writing the best piece of fiction of the 20th century. Frodo's original name was Bingo. And Bingo was his name-o. Not that Frodo is any less comical, we're just used to it, I guess. At least Frodo doesn't conjure up images of a smoky gambling hall full of desperate grumpy old people. Strider's original ranger name was Trotter. And he was a hobbit. I'm serious! Considering he had no idea what he was going to write about when he started writing, I'd say it turned out rather well.