Can Middle Earth Top That Galaxy Far, Far Away?
Both sites feature movie news updates - heavily focused on casting at this point - essays and features about the Tolkien bibliography, news on the new LOTR CD-ROM game, regular chats and message boards. TOR.com has a new feature that converts the date from Middle Earth to Gregorian and lists events from the books on the dates they occurred. TOR.net offers an excellent series of essays on the Tolkien's books. No wonder all three webmasters feel the books are the core of their projects.
"Tolkien has been a great influence on me, the beginning of all my science fiction and fantasy likes and dislikes," said Jon, who hopes to add a Ph.D. in English Lit to his credits.
To ensure that focus doesn't get buried in movie fever, TOR.com has developed a relationship with Tolkien publisher Houghton-Mifflin, while TOR.net is setting up a special section to be called "The Green Books of Middle Earth." With the help of Douglas Anderson, author of The Annotated Hobbit, Xoanan and company hope to establish a kind of literary colony with essays, trivia contests, chats and message boards dedicated solely to Tolkien's books.
"The heart of Tolkien is still the literature," Jon said. "That I don't think we should forget."
The web wizards are all fairly confident that Peter Jackson will do a good job with the trilogy. Xoanon noted that because Jackson doesn't have the glamour of a Spielberg or a Lucas, there is less chance LOTR will be "Jackson" films instead of "Tolkien" films.
"I know that Peter Jackson has a love for Lord of the Rings and someone who has that much love for the books is not going to stray too far," he explained. "He's not going to make too many of his own creative changes."
Ted said he was impressed by the dozen or so production sketches that are currently displayed on the films' official home site. (He also noted that New Line had to open that site ahead of schedule because an enterprising fan dug out the secret URL to it. Deja Star Wars?)
There is also no doubt that both sites are a labor of love, although Xoanon, Tehanu and their HTML Meisters Calisuri and Corvar have started accepting limited advertising to help cover administrative costs.
"The only thing in it for us is to meet other people who share the same passions as we do, and its been really neat," Ted said.
Designing and updating these rapidly
Latest Articles