The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug – a sneak preview of first footage

Running rings round Tolkien? … Peter Jackson on the set of The Hobbit.

Peter Jackson’s preview of the sequel to the Rings prequel shows the director taking fresh liberties with Tolkien’s work.

By Ben Child

The first instalment in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, An Unexpected Journey, may not have swept the board at the Oscars or even ended up as one of the year’s best-reviewed films, but audiences seemed to warm to the New Zealand film-maker’s epic, expanded take on (the first third of) JRR Tolkien‘s gentle and breezy 1937 children’s fantasy. At some point along the line there are going to be some very confused youngsters dipping into the 250-page book after watching all three movies and wondering what on Middle-earth happened to Radagast, Galadriel, Saruman and all that fighting, but hey … childhood’s tough.

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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey overcomes setbacks for premiere

‘Frame envy’ as Peter Jackson brings first film in latest JRR Tolkien Middle-earth trilogy to screen in Wellington.

By Ben Child

They trooped to Wellington in their tens of thousands, from all over the globe, dressed as dwarves, goblins, hobbits, elves – and other, less easily identifiable Middle-earth creatures.

Almost a decade after Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings triptych of films set the global box office on fire to the tune of $2.9bn (£1.8bn), the director was back in New Zealand to premiere the first part of his wildly (in some quarters) anticipated adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

There was scant wriggle-room on either side of the 500-metre-long red carpet snaking towards the Embassy theatre where the first part of a planned trilogy The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was screened for the first time to the public. An Air New Zealand plane decked out in Middle-earth livery flew low overhead, to roars of approval.

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Tolkien estate sues Hobbit producers over video and gambling games

The Hobbit: an unexpected journey to the lawyers

Lawsuit alleges Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit merchandising infringes copyright and upsets fans.

By Alison Flood

“Irreparable harm” has been done to JRR Tolkien’s legacy by gambling games featuring characters from The Lord of the Rings, according to an $80m (£50m) lawsuit filed by the Tolkien estate against the producers of the imminent film of The Hobbit.

The suit [PDF], filed in a Los Angeles court on Monday, sees the Tolkien estate, its trustees and publisher HarperCollins taking legal action against Warner Bros, its subsidiary New Line Productions and the Saul Zaentz Company’s Middle-earth Enterprises. It alleges that they have infringed the copyright granted to them by releasing gambling games and online video games based on Tolkien’s inventions, claiming that the 1969 sale of film rights only included limited merchandising rights to use characters, places, objects and events referenced in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. These limited rights included the right to sell “tangible” products such as “figurines, tableware, stationery items, clothing, and the like”, but did not include “electronic or digital rights, rights in media yet to be devised or other intangibles such as rights in services”.

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‘New’ JRR Tolkien epic due out next year

JRR Tolkien … ‘new’ book out next year.

Lord of the Rings author’s previously unseen 200-page poem of Arthurian legend draws on tales of ancient Britain rather than Middle-earth.

By Alison Flood

It’s the story of a dark world, of knights and princesses, swords and sorcery, quests and betrayals, and it’s from the pen of JRR Tolkien. But this is not Middle-earth, it’s ancient Britain, and this previously unpublished work from the Lord of the Rings author stars not Aragorn, Gandalf and Frodo, but King Arthur.

HarperCollins has announced the acquisition of Tolkien’s never-before-published poem The Fall of Arthur, which will be released for the first time next May. Running to more than 200 pages, Tolkien’s story was inspired by Geoffrey of Monmouth and Thomas Malory’s tales of King Arthur, and is told in narrative verse. Set in the last days of Arthur’s reign, the poem sees Tolkien tackling the old king’s battle to save his country from Mordred the usurper, opening as Arthur and Gawain go to war.

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What’s the loveliest word in the English language?

By Harriet Powney

It was the linguist JR Firth who, in 1930, coined the term phonoaesthetics to refer to the study of how words sound. I came across it recently when, 26 years later than most, I heard Marlow ask in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective: “What’s the loveliest word in the English language, officer? In the sound it makes in the mouth? In the shape it makes in the page? E-L-B-O-W.” (And yes, for anyone else who didn’t know, it is where the band got its name.)

The film Donnie Darko offers a tip of its hat, too, in the lines of Drew Barrymore’s character, teacher Karen Pomeroy: “This famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language, of all the endless combinations of words in all of history, ‘cellar door’ is the most beautiful.” The famous linguist was none other than JRR Tolkien, and he made the claim in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh.

There’s also Robert Beard’s The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English. Although you’re unlikely to agree with them all, Beard’s list does help make some phonetic links: the B and L common to bungalow, elbow and one of my favourites, for example. Long vowels and liquid sounds such as L and R have been considered particularly beautiful since the ancient Greeks, but I’d love to know where B fits in.

So, in no particular order, here are five that for me illustrate Tolkien’s description of the phonetic pleasure of words as “simpler, deeper-rooted, and yet more immediate” than any practical or structural understanding of their sense.

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JRR Tolkien’s Nobel prize chances dashed by ‘poor prose’

JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings appendix "Born of Hope" being filmed in 2008. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty

Lord of the Rings author, nominated by CS Lewis, rejected by 1961 jury, newly opened archive reveals

By Alison Flood

The Lord of the Rings might have spawned a thousand pallid imitations, been crowned the UK’s best-loved book and sold millions of copies around the world, but according to newly declassified documents, it was damned by the Nobel prize jury on the grounds of JRR Tolkien’s second-rate prose.

The mysterious workings of the Nobel committee remain a secret until 50 years after the award is made, when the archive for that year is opened in the Nobel library in Stockholm. Swedish reporter Andreas Ekström delved into 1961′s previously classified documents on their release this week, to find the jury passed over names including Lawrence Durrell, Robert Frost, Graham Greene, EM Forster and Tolkien to come up with their eventual winner, Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andrić.

While Andrić was lauded for “the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country”, other nominated writers received shorter shrift from the Nobel committee, Ekström revealed in Swedish newspaper Sydsvenska Dagbladet.

The prose of Tolkien – who was nominated by his friend and fellow fantasy author CS Lewis – “has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality”, wrote jury member Anders Österling. Frost, on the other hand, was dismissed because of his “advanced age” – he was 86 at the time – with the jury deciding the American poet’s years were “a fundamental obstacle, which the committee regretfully found it necessary to state”. Forster was also ruled out for his age – a consideration that no longer bothers the jury, which awarded the prize to the 87-year-old Doris Lessing in 2007 – with Österling calling the author “a shadow of his former self, with long lost spiritual health”.

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First Trailer for Peter Jackson’s ‘The Hobbit’ Is Here!

The Hobbit

By Rob W. Hart

It’s still hard to believe that movies based on JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit are actually happening. Years of legal wrangling and a failed start with director Guillermo del Toro made it seem like we’d have to live with Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy as the only cinematic interpretation of Tolkien’s work–which, admittedly, is not a bad thing to live with.

Then Jackson stepped back up to the plate, made the brilliant decision to cast Martin Freeman as Bilbo, and said he’d make two films out of The Hobbit.

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Tolkien’s Hobbit drawings published to mark 75th anniversary

The Art of the Hobbit reveals Tolkien's visual imagination through 100 works. Photograph: JRR Tolkien, courtesy of the Tolkien estate/HarperCollins

Extensive collection of illustrations and paintings show fantasy author was an accomplished artist.

By Alison Flood

A swath of JRR Tolkien’s original illustrations for The Hobbit are to be published for the first time this week as part of celebrations to mark the 75th anniversary of the book’s publication.

The published version of The Hobbit includes around 20 illustrations by its author, as well as the well-known dust jacket painting of the mountains which Bilbo Baggins passes through on his adventures. But when HarperCollins began preparing for the book’s 75th anniversary next year, the publisher discovered Tolkien had actually created more than 100 illustrations, which lay buried in his archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and were only recently digitised.

“That was a surprise. I thought there might be 40-50 in total,” said publisher David Brawn. “But there are 110 Hobbit pictures, about two dozen of which haven’t been published before.”

Ranging from line drawings in ink to watercolours and sketches, the collected drawings will be published on 27 October as The Art of the Hobbit. HarperCollins hopes the collection and the anniversary will shed new light on the fantasy author – and on his first novel.

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To Kill a Mockingbird voted UK’s best-loved book

Mary Badham and Gregory Peck in the 1962 film of To Kill A Mockingbird. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/UI

Harper Lee’s novel edges out previous favourites Pride and Prejudice and The Lord of the Rings.

By Alison Flood

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has replaced previous favourites The Lord of the Rings and Pride and Prejudice as the nation’s most-loved read.

The classic novel topped a poll of more than 6,000 people for World Book Night, with JRR Tolkien’s fantasy coming in sixth place after heading the BBC’s Big Read in 2003, when three quarters of a million votes were cast. Jane Austen’s evergreen romance came in second, after romping in in first in a poll of 2,000 for World Book Day in 2007.

The World Book Night survey saw over 6,000 people submit the top 10 titles they most love to read, give and share. More than 8,000 books were suggested, with Lee’s story of Scout Finch growing up in the American south receiving the most nominations, with 676 votes. Second place went to Pride and Prejudice (521 votes), with Markus Zusak’s modern children’s novel, The Book Thief, coming in third (489), Jane Eyre fourth (415) and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife fifth (405).

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George R R Martin: Tolkien for the 21st century

With his fantasy books selling by the million, he’ll be first choice for many a beach-read this summer. But the power behind ‘Game of Thrones’ provides depth as well as furious entertainment

By Ian Irvine

He says "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one."

The UK’s latest sensational fiction besteller is A Dance with Dragons.

In just over a week it has sold 30,000 copies in hardback. George R R Martin’s novel, the fifth (of a planned seven) in his series A Song of Ice and Fire, has been garnering rave reviews as well as huge sales – just like its predecessors. Altogether they have sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. Roz Kaveney, in her admiring review in The Independent, noted that “it is hard to accept that something that enormous and that popular can be as good as people tell you it is”. But it is. Jace Lacob observed in The Daily Beast that it was “Martin’s finest work yet, a taut and relentless masterpiece that reaffirms the reader’s obsession with the panoply of unforgettable characters that Martin has created, and the brutal, glittering, terrible world in which these novels are set”.

Time magazine included him in its 2011 list of the 100 most influential people in the world and has dubbed him “the American Tolkien”, which is true in the sense that Martin is writing an epic in the fantasy genre, but also misleading. The Lord of the Rings, for all its virtues, is a simple story of goodies vs baddies. By contrast, Martin’s fantasy world of Westeros is peopled by complex characters with complicated motivations. “I’ve always agreed with William Faulkner when he said that the human heart in conflict with itself is the only thing worth writing about,” Martin has said.

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