Recently I revealed that I had been invited to participate in TheOneRing.net’s panel on the Hobbit project at the upcoming Comic-Con. Today the schedule was posted. We’re among several panels happening at 10 am on Friday, July 25. I can’t tell you who the “possible special guests” might be, but the rumors I’ve heard are pretty exciting! I hope those of you who want to attend have purchased your passes already. The 4-day ones were sold out some time ago. The Friday and Saturday one-day passes are also gone, and there are only a few one-day passes for Thursday and Sunday.

(Variety posted an informative story on Comic-Con yesterday. Apparently the Con has finally topped out in terms of attendance–125,000 fans last year–and may be looking to move to larger quarters after its deal with the San Diego Convention Center expires in 2012.)

I’m really looking forward to my first Comic-Con. Years ago this was an important venue for promoting The Lord of the Rings, and no doubt it will be important for The Hobbit as well. This year Weta Workshop will be present, as will Sideshow Collectibles, and probably other companies with LOTR franchise tie-ins. Electronic Arts, the official video-games maker, is co-sponsoring the event.

TORN will be selling copies of The Frodo Franchise, and I’ll be around to sign copies for you. (If you’ve already got one and want it signed, bring it along. No requirement that you buy one on the spot.) I’ll also be blogging during the Con. Hope to see some of you there!

On June 8, Chris “Calisuri” Pirrotta, one of the co-founders of TheOneRing.net, was interviewed on the “Fictional Frontiers” program on WNJC 1360 am, Philadelphia. TORN has posted a transcript here. There are main topics of conversation. One is the history of TORN, including the three Oscar-night parties of 2002, 2003, and 2004. Much of this will be familiar to readers of The Frodo Franchise, since I interviewed Chris and some other TORN people for the book. Still, Chris provides additional information and a lot of details. He also goes over some of the main points of the recent Peter Jackson-Guillermo del Toro Q&A session.

Tehanu, co-founder of TheOneRing.net, has written some of the most perceptive comments on the Lord of the Rings film that have appeared on the internet. Now she has weighed in to heartily approve the all-but-certain choice of Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro to direct The Hobbit. She is a big fan of Pan’s Labyrinth and offers insights as to how Del Toro’s approach to fantasy in that film is in some ways similar to Tolkien’s. Highly recommended. You can read her piece here.

Larry Ivy has written to let me know that this year his company, Magical Tours, is for the first time offering a Rings-based tour of England. It’s “The Ring Quest – Origins of Lord of the Rings,” and it will take place from June 14 to 23. You can read about it, including the price and a day by day itinerary, on the company’s website. If you’re a Harry Potter fan, you might want to check out Magical Tours other offerings.

The “Ring Quest” tour is based on the idea that although the films were made in New Zealand—and we all know that travel to the shooting locations there has been popular among fans—the books were inspired by places in England that Tolkien knew. From the looks of the itinerary, there will be a balance between major tourist sites like Stonehenge and places like the Eagle and Child (aka “Bird and Baby”) pub in Oxford, gathering place of the Inklings.

Booking is open now and will end on March 15. The tour size is limited to 20 people, and the price does not include transportation to London.

Entertainment Weekly has a ranking of the top 25 fan websites, and TheOneRing.net is not only on it, but is up at number 6. Not bad for a site devoted to a trilogy that ended four years ago! Of course, now TORN is the go-to site for info on The Hobbit project, but I suspect the ranking was devised before the big news about that broke last week.

The TORN people were incredibly helpful when I was doing the research for The Frodo Franchise, and I’ve got a case study of the site in my chapters on LOTR and the internet. It’s great to see it getting this kind of recognition. Congratulations to the TORN team!

This is a blog about the Lord of the Rings franchise, not the Harry Potter one. But I think that J. K. Rowling’s revelation that Albus Dumbledore is gay has implications for all fandoms. After all, one major activity within any fandom of any size is writing fanfiction. One of Rowling’s remarks may provide yet another bit of evidence that fanfiction is fair use rather than a violation of copyrights. Harry Potter is by far the series that has inspired the largest number of fics, but Rings was second during the time when the films were being released. more »

Browsing through Amazon recently, I came across a DVD called T & T’s Real Travels in Middle Earth. Naturally I was intrigued and ordered a copy, hoping it would be something that I could recommend to those who may never get to New Zealand to see the Lord of the Rings locations for themselves. Alas, it proved disappointing, and I am more inclined to warn fans to avoid it. more »

When I was working on The Frodo Franchise, I bought quite a few things on eBay. The thought was that I might need to photograph licensed products to use as illustrations. All the novel-related licensed objects that appear in the picture on page 11 came from eBay. I ended up with, to say the least, a lot of stuff I didn’t use in the book. Still, some of it is fun to have for its own sake and some is proving useful for publicity photos. Yesterday I got my picture taken for a local newspaper story. I was standing looking over the top of my Kia promotional standee. more »

One thing that the Chronicle of Higher Education’s new article on Prof. Henry Jenkins III (“The Mud-Wrestling Media Maven from MIT” by Jeffrey R. Young) doesn’t tell us is that Henry got his Ph.D. right here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My husband, David Bordwell, was his dissertation adviser. Ever since the 1980s we have followed his career, as they say, with interest. Great interest.

Although Henry’s name comes up in The Frodo Franchise a few times, few reading the book would be aware just how important he was to it. He contributed in three significant ways. more »