TheOneRing.net is pleased to announce that to celebrate the birthdays of Frodo and Bilbo, we are releasing a digital book called Middle-earth Madness. Join Quickbeam, Happy Hobbit, greendragon, MrCere, Kristin Thompson, J.W. Braun and the gang, along with Richard Armitage (Thorin), Sylvester McCoy (Radagast), Richard Taylor (Weta Workshop), Mark Ordesky (LOTR Exec) and many more of your favorites for an in-depth look at the first two Peter Jackson Hobbit movies as well as a look back at his Lord of the Rings.
With it’s scene-by-scene analysis and behind-the-scenes stories, Middle-earth Madness is your tour guide and backstage pass all rolled into one. Best yet, with no spoilers for the third Hobbit film, it’s a great way to look back and reflect before enjoying The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.
You can get yours for Kindle here. Or, check out a free sample chapter here.
(The book is available at Amazon websites worldwide. We will have the it available for Nook very shortly.)
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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As one contest ends, and on the heels of all the news for the third Hobbit movie, we have another contest for all of you. This time we’re teaming up with our friends at HarperCollins Publishers to give away The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Chronicles: Art & Design by Weta Workshop. We’re not just giving away one of these books but 15 of them to fans located all around the world. The contest starts today Sunday September, 21st and will run through the Halloween October 31st, 2014 at midnight PST. These books will be shipped to all the winners on December 17th of this year when the book hits the streets. Make sure when you enter you include ALL of the required information. We will need your full name, email address, phone number, and of course your shipping address.
Enter for a chance to win The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Chronicles: Art & Design.
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Our friends at Harper Collins Publishers, along with our friends at Weta Workshop, have a new Chronicles book coming out for The Hobbit Trilogy. We’re pleased to team up with them to unveil the cover for the new book The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Chronicles: Art & Design. This book, like all the others in this series, is going to be fantastic allowing fans to see the amazing process of bringing this movie to life. You can Pre-order the book right now and have it in your collection on December 17th just before the movie comes out.
Another great book coming out for The Hobbit Trilogy is the The Hobbit Motion Picture Trilogy Location Guide that will take you from Bag End to Erebor and beyond. Ian Brodie is back taking us across Middle-earth much as he did with The Lord of the Rings Location Guides so expect to add another fantastic book to your collection. You can order this book right now with it arriving on October 28th.
Continue reading “Collecting The Precious – The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Chronicles: Art & Design”
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As you know, in May this year J R R Tolkien’s translation of the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf was finally published. This beautiful volume, edited by Christopher Tolkien, also includes commentary on the poem and the task of translating it (taken from the Professor’s own lectures); J R R Tolkien’s own Old English poem, ‘Sellic Spell’ (in both the Anglo Saxon and modern English); and a poem ‘The Lay of Beowulf’, again written by the Professor.
As someone who studied Old English and Middle English at University, and having read both Beowulf and Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I had long been curious about the Professor’s Beowulf translation. It’s been a long wait for this text to be published – and it doesn’t disappoint!
The first thing one notices about the book is what a lovely edition it is. A black hardback with gold lettering on the spine, the book has a paper jacket, which features three of Tolkien’s own illustrations – including on the front a beautiful green dragon, curled like knotwork and delicately coloured. This image and the lettering on the front and spine, in white and gold, are raised – a nice touch which adds to the luxurious feel of this book. (If you want to go REALLY luxurious, Harper Collins, Tolkien’s publishers in Europe, have a special slipcase edition. As I think this is a text to which I will want to refer again and again, I may start saving my pennies for that edition…)
As ever, Christopher Tolkien’s Preface and Notes are helpful and insightful. In the Preface, he addresses the issues of translation: how does one choose the right word to capture all the nuance and implication of a word in another language? There are always multiple options; which one gives the best ‘feel’ of the original? Judging from J R R Tolkien’s lectures, this was something he pondered – and changed his mind about! – over the years, and as such he came back to and edited his translation. Christopher has done his best to put together the ‘final’ version, but as he writes, the text is ‘in one sense complete, but at the same time evidently ‘unfinished”. The interesting notes provided illuminate any question marks over word choices.
Christopher also points out another of the inherent difficulties in preparing such a volume for publication. In the Preface, he quotes from one of his father’s letters to Rayner Unwin, with regard to the publication of the translation of Sir Gawain:
- ‘I am finding the selection of notes, and compressing them, and the introduction, difficult. Too much to say, and not sure of my target. The main target is, of course, the general reader of literary bent but with no knowledge of Middle English; but it cannot be doubted that the book will be ready by students, and by academic folk…’
This difficulty of target audience, however, turns out not to be an issue for the volume Christopher Tolkien has put together here; it is neatly arranged so as to be easy for the reader to take from it what he or she wishes. If you are only interested in reading Beowulf in modern English, so be it; if you are curious about Tolkien’s notes, they are there for you; if you want to see how J R R Tolkien crafted a poem in Anglo-Saxon, you can read his ‘Sellic Spell’ in Old English – but it’s there in modern English, too. Thus this volume can appeal to academics and ‘lay’ readers alike. (My only slight disappointment is that it does not include the AS Beowulf side by side with Tolkien’s translation; but that extra content would perhaps be superfluous, and certainly it would make the volume rather more weighty!)
The translation itself is in prose – but with an extraordinary sense of the rhythm and shape of the Anglo-Saxon verse. As Christopher writes (in the Introduction), ‘…my father, as it seems to me, determined to make a translation as close as he could to the exact meaning in detail of the Old English poem, far closer than could ever be attained by translation into ‘alliterative verse’, but nonetheless with some suggestion of the rhythm of the original.’ To my ear, Tolkien’s version has a strong feeling of the verse shapes; the two phrase pattern of Old English poetry seems very much to inform the structure of his sentences, and there is a beautiful musicality to the shape of the language. This occasionally means that the syntax is a little complicated, and one needs to read the line aloud to work out the exact meaning – but this is no bad thing. Beowulf is a poem which is meant to be spoken aloud – and I think this translation would be wonderful as a bedtime story!
(Tolkien’s detailed, prose translation is a great companion to Seamus Heaney’s verse translation; the two translations together shed much light on the scope, the energy and the feel of the original Anglo-Saxon poem.)
I haven’t yet read all of the other content of this publication. I’m excited to discover ‘Sellic Spell’: it is referred to on the book’s fly leaf as ‘a story written by Tolkien suggesting what might have been the form and style of an Old English folktale of Beowulf, in which there was no association with the “historical legends” of the northern kingdoms.’ This makes me wonder if it ties in to Tolkien’s desire to create a English mythology; perhaps this is his version of a specifically English (rather than Danish or Norse) telling of the tale of Grendel and his vanquisher.
‘The Lay of Beowulf’ consists of two poems in ballad form, telling the same stories of the monster and the hero. Tolkien himself had noted, of these texts, ‘Intended to be sung’ – and charmingly, Christopher writes that he remembers ‘his singing this ballad to me when I was seven or eight years old.’ What a delight – again, these poems would make excellent bedtime reading!
I have yet to discover fully all the joys of this publication, but so far it is proving to be a magical and enthralling read. You don’t have to be an Anglo-Saxon scholar to enjoy this book (though you won’t be disappointed by it if you are!): if you’re a fan of Tolkien; if you are fascinated by Old English; if you just enjoy a good tale of monsters and battles – you should get your hands on a copy.
[J R R Tolkien Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary is published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and in Europe by Harper Collins. You can order it from Amazon – click here.]
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The long-awaited Tolkien translation of Beowulf is out now. So, if you haven’t pre-ordered, you should be able to wander into your favourite bookstore and grab yourself a copy (or just head to Amazon.
Edited by Christopher Tolkien, Beowulf includes the translation in prose plus an illuminating commentary, based on a series of lectures given by J.R.R. Tolkien at Oxford in the 1930s. Continue reading “The long-awaited Tolkien translation of Beowulf is out now!”
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Our friends at Weta Workshop have a couple of new books for fans to add to their collections. The first book is the next in the Chronicles series, which gives you a great inside look at the task of bringing the many costumes, armour, and weapons that were needed to bring The Hobbit Trilogy to life. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Chronicles – Cloaks and Daggers does just that, but it doesn’t just cover the second film, it also covers the many designs needed in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. If you pre-order the book right now you can get it signed by some of the folks who helped bring these films to the big screen!
The second release Weta has for fans is an amazing looking two book set covering the 20 years they have been helping to bring films to life. This inside look is brimming with never-before-seen content covering films such as; The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Hobbit Trilogy, Avatar, King Kong, District 9, and much more. You can get The Hobbit Art Book for $39 and Weta: The Art of Film Magic – 20 Years of of Weta for $99.
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TheOneRing.net is pleased to announce that to celebrate the birthdays of Frodo and Bilbo, we are releasing a digital book called Middle-earth Madness. Join Quickbeam, Happy Hobbit, greendragon, MrCere, Kristin Thompson, J.W. Braun and the gang, along with Richard Armitage (Thorin), Sylvester McCoy (Radagast), Richard Taylor (Weta Workshop), Mark Ordesky (LOTR Exec) and many more of your favorites for an in-depth look at the first two Peter Jackson Hobbit movies as well as a look back at his Lord of the Rings.
