The results are in! After three weeks of intense competition we can finally crown a winner! In the end, Thranduil — the Sindarin king of the Woodland Realm — has taken the crown in our 2014 Middle-earth March Madness contest!
We received more than 20,000 votes in the final, and Thranduil (Thrandy to his nearest and dearest?) soundly defeated his worthy opponent Legolas (aka Leggy) with 64.18% of those votes! I guess it is good to be king!
We’d like to thank you all for participating in this year’s event and hope you had a fun time discussing the finer points of your favourite Middle-earth characters and objects, regardless of whether you viewed the contests as a physical battle, a game of wits, or a popularity contest (all valid ways to vote!). It’s also a neat way to explore what makes these characters such interesting and vital parts of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
Continue reading “Congratulations to our 2014 Middle-earth March Madness champion: Thranduil!”
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Chairman Tobias M. Eckrich of the German Tolkien Society (Deutsche Tolkien Gesellschaft) recently chatted with Richard Armitage about his time on the Hobbit set. What he says about the Erebor interior scenes in the confrontation with Smaug being shot inside nothing but a great green box is interesting — one wonders whether a theatre background helps with the adjustment to such an absence of visual cues.
Don’t forget to follow the link at the bottom for the complete interview. You can find the English transcript immediately below the German translation.
Continue reading “Richard Armitage chats with the German Tolkien Society”
If you have a Tolkien/Middle-earth inspired poem you’d like to share, then send it to poetry@theonering.net. One poem per person may be submitted each month. Please make sure to proofread your work before sending it in. TheOneRing.net is not responsible for poems posting with spelling or grammatical errors.
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In what is possibly of the biggest boilovers imaginable, Middle-earth March Madness for 2014 has come down to a father-son battle for the title honours!
That’s right: it’s a Thranduil vs Legolas final.
After a very slow semi-final start, Thranduil clawed his way back through the field to eventually topple Aragorn out of the contest, while Legolas and Thorin waged a neck-and-neck battle for quite some time before the former pulled away in the vote.
Continue reading “Father vs Son! The Middle-earth March Madness Final is set! Thranduil vs. Legolas!”
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It’s not all sparkles, party-time and un-ending barrels of Dorwinion wine in the underground halls of Thranduil’s stronghold.
In fact, if one delves a little into Unfinished Tales a number emerge why one should consider Thranduil quite a formidable ruler, especially in relation to some of his elven peers. Here are four of mine (you may have more).
Continue reading “Four reasons Thranduil is smarter than your average elf”
If you have a Tolkien/Middle-earth inspired poem you’d like to share, then send it to poetry@theonering.net. One poem per person may be submitted each month. Please make sure to proofread your work before sending it in. TheOneRing.net is not responsible for poems posting with spelling or grammatical errors.
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Here’s the third of our four semi-final contestants in our 2014 Middle-earth March Madness contest — Aragorn, descendent of the line of Isildur and Elendil, heir to the throne of Gondor and Arnor. In this piece, our own Quickbeam examines just what makes this character tick, and the traits that truly make him … king.
Kingly proof…
by Cliff “Quickbeam” Broadway
Strider, Aragorn, Longshanks, Telcontar, Elessar, and several other names come to mind for this particular character. But the first impression a non-Tolkien outsider would get from a man who has a dozen aliases is that he was probably a criminal. Maybe they’d think he was constantly moving from place to place, switching names because he was the equivalent of a modern-day “identity thief” who was on the lam! Funny how things in our modern world don’t always reflect clearly on mythology.
Continue reading “Aragorn’s kingly proof…”
If you have a Tolkien/Middle-earth inspired poem you’d like to share, then send it to poetry@theonering.net. One poem per person may be submitted each month. Please make sure to proofread your work before sending it in. TheOneRing.net is not responsible for poems posting with spelling or grammatical errors.
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Here’s the second of our four semi-final contestants in our 2014 March Madness contest — Legolas, member of the Fellowship of the Ring.
In this piece, Tolkien scholar Michael Martinez discusses the paradox of Legolas — “both old and young, both wise and yet inexplicably ignorant of the wide world around him”.
Don’t forget to click the link at the bottom to continue to the full essay.
Speaking of Legolas…
by Michael Martinez
I decided to set myself a challenge and write something about Legolas which hasn’t been said before. There seems to be a lot of curiosity about this Elf. People want to know all sorts of things about him, such as what color was his hair, who was his mother, when was he born, was he at the Battle of Five Armies?
Continue reading “Speaking of Legolas…”
If you have a Tolkien/Middle-earth inspired poem you’d like to share, then send it to poetry@theonering.net. One poem per person may be submitted each month. Please make sure to proofread your work before sending it in. TheOneRing.net is not responsible for poems posting with spelling or grammatical errors.
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The results are in! After three weeks of intense competition we can finally crown a winner! In the end, Thranduil — the Sindarin king of the Woodland Realm — has taken the crown in our 2014 Middle-earth March Madness contest! 
