Monday, April 29, 2019

Happy 20th birthday to TheOneRing.net

I think we may have missed a birthday greeting, so here is a belated one to all the good folks at TORn, otherwise known as TheOneRing.net. They were the original LOTR movie fansite, and certainly throughout Welly-moot's lifecycle (and NZ Noldor's time before that, still available as an archive on http://nznoldor.blogspot.com/) there were a lot of interactions with them.

They've been around for 20 years - about twice that of my efforts. For that, a big congratulations for continuing to serve the fans well!


Happy 20th birthday TORn, from all of us here!

  - Jack


Friday, April 12, 2019

Register your interest?

Hello everyone,

As you may have heard, the new Tolkien bio-pic is to be released in New Zealand on June the 6th. Obviously we should go to this, either individually or as a group - who is keen to join us? So far we've got Alex & myself, and Kathy from the One Room LOTR Fan Museum. If you're keen, leave me a message here, on the Welly-moot Facebook page, or email me on jack@welly-moot.com.

If we've got enough people interested, we can organise an evening around it, with possibly a dinner somewhere (Yum-cha anyone?).

https://www.flicks.co.nz/movie/tolkien/


--

On another note, this link seemed appropriate at the moment, what with the events in Christchurch prompting some soul searching for us all (hopefully). The question is often asked - was Tolkien racist? There are definitely racist overtones in the Middle-earth sagas - the superiority of the elves compared to, say, the dwarves is obvious, and is explained well in the Silmarillion. However, was he alluding to his feelings about the Human race?

Read what Dimitri Fimi has to say about it. It makes for an interesting read, I think. (thanks Kathy for the link)

https://theconversation.com/was-tolkien-really-racist-108227

--

One final note - an administrative note, and probably of interest to nobody. As you may have heard, Google is cutting its Google+ service, which means the G+ button will be removed off the main welly-moot blog. I have the distinct impression our Google+ site has never been used by anyone, so feel free to ignore this Very Important Notice. If you don't know what this is all about, just ignore the whole paragraph.
--

  - Jack