ATLANTA – Dragon Con is in full swing now and TheOneRing.net and the gaggle of J.R.R. Tolkien fans in attendance quickly made a mark. This is a hard-core geek-fest at its finest and genre fans attacked the event with all the passion of a Hobbit in a buffet line.
The TORn booth is nestled near the dealer room in the bowels of the Marriott in downtown Atlanta. Two of the four site founders – Calisuri and Corvar – along with a solid backing of staff were on hand to greet fans, distribute free buttons, sell TORn shirts and let people know about its upcoming, unofficial preview of “Return Of The King,” scheduled for Saturday and Sunday.
Dragon Con, grown from a group of 1,400 fans in 1987, and expanded to a crowd expected to exceed 20,000 this year, fills to bursting the two hotels in downtown where various branches of the “fantasy tree” cross twigs and interests. TORn’s downtown offices, perched high above the beautiful city and the “hollow” interior of the hotel, will be bringing full daily reports along with live web cam shots all weekend long. Check the TORn Dragon Con scrapbook for a collection of images of the colorful conglomeration of fans devoted to the darkest and seemingly most forgotten corners of the genre house.
Houghton-Mifflin, who publishes the Tolkien works, had a special treat for fans who were willing to take time to fill out a reader survey at the TORn booth. Just a few minutes of writing earned old veterans and newbies alike with a Elijah Wood photo cover of “The Fellowship Of The RIng.” If you haven’t been paying attention, HM just released its final movie tie in book for “Lord Of The Rings.” The soft back all-in-one is a the beautiful edition with fold out maps and the movie photo of the One Ring on Sauron’s mailed fist.
Friday’s brightest star in the Tolkien universe, John Rhys-Davis, couldn’t make the show, although at posting time the reasons were unknown. Fans still had plenty to keep them busy Friday with lessons in Elvish, serious Tolkien discussions and impromptu entertainment by Quickbeam and other convention assistants. Discussion of the proposed big-stage Tolkien musical led into nostalgic and amusing renditions of the Rankin/Bass tune “Where There Is a Whip.”
While mixing with fans, professionals and exhibitors, TORn uncovered a few precious rumours and secrets – all of which we will share – concerning the upcoming ROTK releases and the Tolkien Universe. Read other Dragon Con reports for details. Wish you were here…
On behalf of the entire TheOneRing.net staff, Welcome to DragonCon 2003 LIVE from Atlanta GA. Throughout the next few days, we’ll have a LIVE webcam broadcasting on our DragonCon page, as well as image galleries and reports from the convention floor. Stay tuned for more!
We have two costuming panels in store for you this year and each one will have different examples of costumes from the movies. These costumes have been made by fans with a deep love of LOTR and wonderful talents in the field of costuming. Here’s what is on the slate for these two [sessions].
Below, read news and see pictures from last year’s Dragon*Con. Above will be events from Dragon*Con 2003.
Targa (you remember him, the tall guy in the glasses?) spent a good deal of time with us in the Tolkien track, and stopped in Barlimans tonight to let everyone know he’s posted his Dragon*Con 2002 [pictures]. If you have any cool Tolkien track or TORN related pictures, please email jincey!
Fans, Friends and Fun
Day three of the Con was the biggest yet. I pity any unsuspecting hotel guest who chose this weekend to stay at either of these hotels, unless they happened to be broad-minded and loved science fiction and fantasy. For us, we loved the endless parade of mind-boggling costumes that passed our table. Most of us haven’t had time to visit any exhibits or talks outside of the Tolkien track events, but just watching the other attendees walk past was all the entertainment we needed. Besides, spending all day chatting to Tolkien fans is not a bad way to pass time. We had a laptop set up on the table playing the preview and that would act like a magnet, and there’d always be a laugh of delight when we pointed out the moment where Treebeard blinks. It’s always great to see people watching it for the first time – their jaws drop. We gave away copies of the Fellowship to kids who looked sufficiently excited about the whole thing. Especially ones dressed as Harry Potter or as young Jedi who were ready to take on a new adventure. I envied them having the Fellowship to read for the first time.
We had bookmarks to give away – some of them official art generously provided by Houghton Mifflin, but we also had eight designs given to us by TORN fan artists. People loved them and we watched our stacks of bookmarks get smaller and smaller all day.
We closed the day’s activities at the table with a raffle drawing which drew a huge crowd. We had some Houghton Mifflin books and some of our t-shirts to give away. The remainder of give-aways were decided by asking H-M’strivia questions to the people who were left until they’d won everything.
Better late than never – we can announce the winner of our costume competition on Friday night. First place, Lord of the Nazgul, went to Joseph Kiser, who had a great costume and suitably threatening hiss. Second place went to Andy Myers, an uncanny double for Dominic Monaghan whose costume was carefully made. Third prize went to Kathleen Myers, as Aragorn’s mother Gilraen. Overall (and this was something that I noticed about everyone in costume thoughout the convention) one of the challenges that would make or break the ‘believability’ of the costume was their ability to move and gesture appropriately.
Tom Shippey, author of “Tolkien: Author of the Century” gave a second lecture. This one concentrated less on the link between philology and story-telling and more on what he called the group of ‘one-off’ writers like Tolkien, Orwell, Vonnegut, Lewis and Graves who were traumatised by war and each wrote books that were completely unlike the mainstream in literature – they wrote fantasies that tried to figure out what the authors saw as the evils of the twentieth century. If we’d had more time the talk would have continued on with a group discussion on the nature of evil and morality. Which I would venture to suggest was not something that being discussed in many of the other tracks at the convention.
Shippey was a great speaker who laced his enormously learned discourse with great wit and a store of fascinating stories about his connections with Tolkien, C. S Lewis, and the institution of Oxford University.
TORN Digital did an interview with Tom which will appear on this site at a later date. Quickbeam asked him whether he was a Tolkien apologist and Shippey said he would go further and call himself a Tolkien polemic.
There was a very popular talk on arms and armour presented by Joe Piela of Lonely Mountain Forge. He had an impressive array of extremely realistic (and well-worn) weapons and armour. He talked about the way the re-enactment people have discovered, through building and using the ancient weapons, how people must have fought. The shape of the weapon and the armour determines what is possible for the fighter in question. What was very clever was the way he kept referring it back to Tolkien’s writing about warfare. For instance Tolkien described how the riders of Rohan used their spears to skewer the orcs they attacked – and now people who’ve used a horse and spear in modern re-enactments are able to testify how much power an armed rider has to overwhelm footsoldiers in exactly that way. Joe could refer to a section in Tolkien, pull out the armour or weapon to illustrate it, and describe exactly how it was used.
Later, the ‘Elvish 101″ course was totally full as well – in fact they had to present the talk twice to fit everyone in. Since the movie came out, so many more people are able to appreciate how beautiful Elvish sound, and there is a hunger to learn more.
Saulone from the TORN community site There And Back Again was very popular – like every other Tolkien Track event it was full. Saulone gave a potted history of how TABA came to exist. He talked about vector versus non-vector art – the fluid lines of his site are very much what he would call non-vector. It is not mathematically-based. Saulone wanted to build a site using non-vector art.
SPOILER WARNING FOR THE NEXT PARAGRAPH
Due to high demand (YAY) we were moved into a large ballroom in order to give our “Behind the Scenes at TTT” talk. The fans were more interactive and heckled Calisuri over Saruman’s death on the Wizard Kebab scene, even though as he pointed out, there’s no point shooting the messenger. We checked the approval rating for the first film and the casting in the first film, and got the usual hysteria over Legolas. Hey, I stir it up!
Thanks have to go to Ginger, Stefan and Allen who worked tirelessly to get the Greenbriars room set up for each speaker and to provide them with everything they needed. Next year we have been tipped to get a bigger room.
Thanks also go to Jessica who got us great seats in the Masquerade, the eye-boggling costume contest which crowned the evening.
We’d like to thank all the fans that dropped by and said how much they loved our site – some of them were even wearing our TORN t-shirts.
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Sorry we didn’t post any images up with today’s report. The hour was getting late and we ended up using a digital projector in our hotel room and watching FOTR. Look for loads of images tomorrow for the final day of DragonCon.
