"AGE OF THE HOBBITS"

So, thanks to Jim Lowder for the following link, which I doubt I wd have stumbled upon. Seems there's a company that specializes in making movies with titles and themes similar to big-budget releases --e.g. THE DAY THE EARTH STOPPED (not to be confused with THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL) or TRANSMORPHERS (ibid TRANSFORMERS).  I knew there were folks who, every time Disney makes an animated version of a classic folk or fairy tale, immediately releases a genericized version, but didn't know the same happened with live action films.

In this case, they're making a film about Homo floresiensis, the small subrace of hominids discovered in Indonesia a decade or so ago, and thus claim any trademarks and copyrights regarding JRRT's hobbits has no relevance (rather like the guy who called himself "Gandalf the Wizard-Clown" who claimed he'd gotten the name directly from the Elder Edda).   If I were them, I'd shudder at the thought of going up against Saul Zaentz -- who, I note, is misidentified in this piece as a "book publisher", showing that the endemic confusion between Zaentz (the movie people) and the Tolkien Estate (the book people) continues. Alas.

Here's the link to the article, with matching trailers both for the Peter Jackson film and THE AGE OF HOBBITS, for those who want to compare 'look and feel'.


http://www.bleedingcool.com/2012/10/18/the-asylum-defends-historical-drama-age-of-the-hobbits-from-new-line-lawyers/


For those who just want to see the AGE OF HOBBITS trailer, here's that link all by itself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4z_dZSg0Is

I'd say this looks interesting for two reasons: first, its female protagonist, and second, it seems to derive its plot from "The Scouring of the Shire" (hobbits resisting bullying from The Big People), one of the few extended sequences omitted from the Peter Jackson films.

At any rate, an interesting curiosity. Thanks to Jim for sharing.

--John R.

P.S.: Oh, and the release date? Scheduled for December 11th. Just three days before the Big Event . . .

The Blurb

So, Monday I went down to the Barnes & Noble in Federal Way, which I visit once in a while, and discovered that since my last visit they now have a Hobbit Table* -- that is, a table filled entirely with books by (and about) JRRT.** And, while there, I got to see an extremely minor new publication of mine -- a blurb.

Specifically, a blurb for Corey Olsen's new book EXPLORING THE HOBBIT. I've never been asked to do a blurb before; nice to be asked.  I provided both a very short one and a longer one; they chose to go with the longer form (perhaps appropriately, given the expansiveness of my own H.o.H.). Here's what it says:

Most readers race through THE HOBBIT at breakneck speed, drawn onward by the exciting plot. Professor Olsen encourages us to slow down and take the scenic route, savoring each chapter. Through close, careful explication, he points out significant details and draws attention to hidden themes; he's particularly good at pointing out how Tolkien uses poems as characterization.

   Recommended to hobbit fanciers everywhere.

                                                      --John D. Rateliff

I shd point out I'm in good company; this is a well-blurbed book. The back covers has no less than five testimonials: one by Wayne & Christina, then mine, then Michael Drout's, Patrick Currey's, and ending up with Verlyn's. Here's hoping Corey's book gets fans of the book thinking about it as well as enjoying it.

--John R.
current reading: D&D NEXT rules; Philip Larkin book; "The Battle of the Goths & Huns".



*like the one that appeared, then disappeared again suddenly, at the SouthCenter B&N I usually visit.

**plus a few oddities, like Gollum bobble-heads. The mind boggles.

Listening to Talk Radio (Poke-em-with-a-Stick Wednesday)

So, I actually listen to talk radio on a fairly regular basis -- a little in the morning (until it's forced off the air for six or seven midday hours devoted to the horror that is Jazz) while making breakfast, and a little in the afternoon while driving over to pick up Janice after work. Not every day, but more often than not.

But that's NPR, which is not what most people mean these days when they say "Talk Radio". "Talk Radio" has come to mean politicized shock-jocks, mostly right wing, like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Medved (the only radio personality I know of who shares a name with a Tolkien character). That's not my cup of tea, but once in a long while I'll get curious and listen off and on to such shows for a few days, then find myself happy to do without it for another year or two.

This morning, it was curiosity over how they were reporting on last night's debates compared to how various progressive websites were covering the story that lured me into listening. I didn't see the debate itself, having opted for a friend's birthday party instead (hi, Stan!), so it was very much listening to the blind men describing the elephant. The progressive sites were relieved and triumphant, thinking their candidate had done well; the radio hosts varied between insulting the moderator with fat jokes and claiming that their guy didn't lose after all (never a good sign).

The most amusing takeaway from all this, for me, was one radio host's inveighing against a NASA program working to develop food for use on the Mars Mission, once we actually have a Mars mission. Another was a commercial on another channel advertising special Survivalist rations (freeze-dried and canned) that wd remain edible for years, come the End Times.  Here, I thought, was a great chance to kill two birds with one stone: dub the Mars food 'Rapture Rations' and surely those same radio hosts would be clamoring for more money to be spent developing them.

For the rest of today, I think it'll be listening to cds and giving the airwaves a rest.

--John R.

Dunsany's Nobel

So, heard the exciting news a few days ago that not only Tolkien but also Dunsany was once nominated for the Nobel Prize.

The discovery was made by Martin Andersson (many thanks for his sharing it with me), who was leafing through a book by the Swedish Academy at the Goteborg Book Fair that listed all the nominees, and discovered that Dunsany had been nominated in 1950 by the Dublin Centre of Irish PEN, a writers' organization.

The timing of that is interesting, since this was near the end of Dunsany's life, when he was in eclipse. It'd been years since he'd had a play produced, he was nearing the end of a long string of novels, and his main productions were Jorkens stories, the occasional adaptation of an old piece into a radioplay, and endless articles attacking modernism (and other people's punctuation).* Had it come a decade or so earlier, I'd have suspected the hand of Oliver Gogarty, a longtime friend and supporter of Dunsany's, but he seems to have shifted to the U.S. around the outbreak of WWII and played little role in Irish affairs thereafter. So for now the mechanism of how Irish PEN came to be nominating folks, and how they happened to pick upon Dunsany this particular year, remain unknown; more on this may eventually come to light.

Did Dunsany deserve a Nobel? Given that I think he's the finest fantasy short story writer in English, the peer (I wd argue) of Kafka and Borges, I'd say yes. But that's a minority view. Still, it's good to know he was nominated; that someone out there shared my evaluation of his work.

Here's the link:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/nomination/nomination.php?action=show&showid=1127


A Closing Thought: we now know Tolkien was nominated, and that Dunsany was nominated. I wonder if any other fantasy authors have been nominated over the years. Or science fiction authors, for that matter (I'd say Ray Bradbury would have been a worthy candidate). Ironically enough, the very first writer in English to get the prize, Rudyard Kipling, wrote fantasy, though I v. much doubt that it was PUCK OF POOK'S HILL than won him the Nobel.

--John R.





*this may not be as big a factor as all that, given that, as I understand it, the Nobel is supposed to award the whole of the author's work, not what he or she might produce thereafter.

Middle-earth Coinage

So, a few nights ago I found out what I'm reliably informed I won't be getting for Christmas: gold and silver HOBBIT coins being released in New Zealand in connection with the Peter Jackson movie(s).

I think of all the movie tie-in things I've seen and heard of, this is the one that boggles my mind.*   Not that they're minting these, but that they'll actually be legal tender -- technically at any rate (no one's likely to buy $10.00 worth of, say, hobbit snacks** with a one-ounce gold coin, I suspect).

Of course, the news that they're also going to temporarily rename their nation's capital as a movie tie-in also induces boggling, so maybe I'm just easily boggled these days.

Here's the link, courtesy Janice (thanks, JC!):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/10/hobbit-currency-legal-tender-in-lord-of-therings-obsessed-new-zealand_n_1955717.html?utm_hp_ref=books&ir=Books

And for details on specific coins, check here:

http://stamps.nzpost.co.nz/thehobbit

--turns out they go for as little as $29.90 and as much as $3695 (for the one-ounce gold coin, roughly equivalent of the old double eagle) or the modern US mint's Buffalo (which currently goes for about $1840, roughly $100 above the price of gold).

Perhaps the (non-silver, non-gold) Radagast coin is more within my budget . . .

--John R.


*ranking right up there with the Lord of the Nazgul piggybank from the awful Bakshi film thirty-plus years ago

**which is not a licensed product yet, that I know of -- though they did eventually offer Scooby Snacks for sale in stores, so who knows?

Can This Possibly Be True?

So, night before last I was listening to an hour-long interview on NPR's Fresh Air with Nate Silver, the polling guru behind the FiveThirtyEight.com website, which looks at the polls in presidential (and senatorial) elections, weighs their bias, averages the results, and offers his estimation of where the race really stands (right now he gives Mr. Obama about a two-thirds chance of winning, largely because of his strong lead in states like Ohio and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania).*

The whole interview is of interest, if you like this sort of thing (which I do).

The most interesting points to me were, first, his explanation (in part of a discussion of availability of data) of just how expensive and time consuming medieval manuscript production was: he said a single manuscript cost the equivalent of $25,000 in today's money. If true, that explains very well why books were so rare, and precious: why the Merton College library kept all its books in a single huge chest with three great locks, the key to each of which was carried by a different person.  Or why, later on when they got more books (I assume in the first century or so of printing), they chained them to the shelves to keep them going walkabout.  He said that cost fell by about 500%**  with the advent of printing -- still expensive, but no longer prohibitively so.  I'm sure there were more and less expensive Mss (depending on the length of the text and the amount of decoration incorporated into it), but if Silver's figure is anywhere near right, it's illuminating.

Second, there was his explanation of why, despite so much information being available, polls often fail to predict what really will happen.*** The two key factors turn out to be (1) taking into account what you don't know and (2) judging the trustworthiness of new information you come across.

The first is where most polls and predictions fall down. The weather service is careful not to give predictions too far out, since weather systems are too complex to predict with confidence in the long term. However, they're pretty reliable in the short term: if they say it's going to cool off over the next two days, they're probably right.  So here knowing yr limits produces better results.

 In Silver's case, he gives both a "Now Cast" (the odds of either Obama or Romney winning if the race were held today) vs. the predicted election day figure, which he cautions is based on what we know now, and is always subject to the unexpected -- the levy may break, terrorists attack, a smoking gun or compromising footage come to light ("47%"), or someone well and truly put foot in mouth. 

In the case of Tolkien (you knew this was going to get around to Tolkien in the end, didn't you?), we know a lot -- I've recently taken to playing the "What Was Tolkien Doing One Hundred Years Ago Today? game with Wayne & Christina's CHRONOLOGY -- but there are things we don't know. For example, we know relatively little about Tolkien's life at Leeds, the five years that laid the basis of his professional career, and therefore tend to act as if those years were less important than the ones that are better documented.

We also quite often come across conflicting stories -- did THE HOBBIT originate as an oral story he told to his kids during the 1920s, as Tolkien's two eldest sons insisted, or as a written text in the early 1930s, as Tolkien himself repeatedly stated (and the bulk of the documentary evidence supports)? Did C. S. Lewis write THE DARK TOWER in 1938 or 1946?  Are MR. BLISS and FARMER GILES written before THE HOBBIT, or after THE HOBBIT, or both (i.e., drafted before but with final versions after)?  When we get a new piece of evidence, we weigh how probable it is based on what we already know.

For example, with a 1999 account by a Swedish woman who was an au-pair girl in the Tolkien household in 1930-31 saying Tolkien began THE HOBBIT while she was there, the probability of errors in the latter account is high. There was a long gap between the event and its being recorded, the person involved was v. old at the time it was recorded, and her memories being taken down by a reporter rather than written up by herself. And yet what she says fits in remarkably well with the preponderance of other evidence, of which she herself wd have been unaware; this veracity in what we can check lends credence to elements in her account not found elsewhere.

By contrast, the evidence of John and Michael Tolkien contradicts a well-established pattern. Tolkien is often wrong about dates, but in such cases he almost always errs by predating the event -- as when he claimed he'd begun THE LORD OF THE RINGS before THE HOBBIT was published (rather than three months afterwards), or that he'd delivered the OFS lecture in 1938 (rather than 1939) and written LEAF BY NIGGLE in 1938-39 (rather than 1942-43). The pattern is clear, and it lends weight to a later dating being more probable than an earlier dating.

In general, a good reminder about handling evidence and drawing reasonable conclusions from it.

--John R.

current reading: THE UNOFFICIAL HOBBIT HANDBOOK (2012), ORESAMA TEACHER (2007-present)

*this is down from an 85% chance just a few weeks ago, when Mr. Obama was leading in ten out of twelve 'swing' states after a long string of Romney gaffs.

**for a transcript of Silver's exact words, see the last paragraph under the following link:

http://www.npr.org/2012/10/10/162594751/signal-and-noise-prediction-as-art-and-science

--of course, a handmade and carefully illuminated Ms. today on vellum or parchment might well run that much as a luxury item -- even high-quality limited-edition machine-produced reproductions run in the hundreds or thousands.

***according to Silver,  pundits are almost always wrong, but this seems to be by their statements being based on advocacy, not probability.

--Silver does note that local weathermen are far less accurate, deliberately overpredicting bad weather as a way of creating a little drama in hopes of attracting viewers.


........................
UPDATE: As two readers have pointed out in Comments (thanks Ardamir; thanks Troels), the women in the example I used was Icelandic, not Swedish. My mistake. Troels also points out that by a factor of 500 is not the same as 500%. I'd thought my meaning was clear enough; apparently not.
   Thanks, as always, for the corrections.
--JDR

My Cat Fix While I Was Away

So, I've often noticed when with my father-in-law that he's developed baby radar: he loves spending time with his great-grandchildren so much that he immediately notices any baby or toddler in any restaurant or public place he enters. I even got to see him do a I've-got-more-great-grandchildren-than-you contest with another senior citizen he ran into (he won, ten to seven -- but only by including his youngest son's son's soon-to-be-born little girl)

With me, it's cats. I love petting and playing with other people's cats when I visit their home, like to notice cats watching out windows taking in the world when I'm on a walk, and volunteer once a week at an adoption room for a no-kill shelter (Purrfect Pals, centered up in Arlington) -- letting the cats out of their cages to wander freely in a glass-walled room while I clean up their dirt boxes, give them fresh food and water, and "socialize' them (pet them, play with them, sometimes walk them on a leash). With the result that I find myself on the look-out for cats when I'm away from home.

During our two weeks in England in September, I saw four cats:
--one self-satisified sitting in the garden behind our hotel (Celtic House, not far from Russell Sq). Only saw this one when I was looking down from a third story window (second floor they wd call it), but clearly at ease in its own surroundings.
--one friendly but self-possessed little striped brown stripling at Lacock, a Cotswold village that looks exactly as it looked several centuries ago. This one we came across just outside the churchyard; it let me pet it, then let me know when it'd had enough.
--one yellow cat, lean and furtive, that slipped by us, pressing itself against the buildings on a street in a bad neighborhood we were walking through when we got off-track on our way to a tube station. Clearly trying to avoid being noticed, and aside from myself, successfully. Someone opened the door to an apartment building on her way out, and it dashed inside. Looked like this one has a hard life but knows how best to cope; hope it has somewhere it can get enough to eat and a safe place to sleep.
--finally, a neighborhood cat (longhair, grey and fluffy I think) we saw making its rounds the last night we were in Bath, walking some unfamiliar streets on the west edge of town looking for a laundromat (with the help of some friendly local folks, we did, but it had already closed. Que sera.


And during our week in Milwaukee (The Ambassador), Delavan (Lake Lawn Lodge), and Harvard (Ravenstone Castle), I saw two:
--Sir Peter, a large brown striped cat who reigns at Ravenstone Castle, the B&B we stayed in on the outskirts of Harvard (he was shy about approaching us but friendly when petted, and appreciated the catnip teabag I'd brought along as an offering to him.
--an orange and white cat, prowling the neighborhood in Harvard nr my father-in-law's apt: didn't want to be approached by strangers (e.g., me) but didn't flee panic-strickened; just removed itself when I moved towards it and went back to what it'd been doing (looking for mice in the tall grass, I think) as soon as I withdrew.

And then back home again to our own three: Rigby and Hastur and Feanor, who are emphatic that we're not to go away and leave them again for a while.

--John R.