[Added August 26: Turns out that my online writing about the Tolkien films has not come to an abrupt end. I won’t be posting here, but I’ve accepted an invitation from TheOneRing.net to join their staff and contribute occasionally. I’m sure most of you are TORn readers, so I hope you’ll find my posts when they appear. More details here.

As many of you know, I have been hoping to write a follow-up book to The Frodo Franchise, dealing with the making of The Hobbit. My plan was to examine the impact of digital filmmaking technology on the way the production team. I also wanted to look at how globalization has affected the composition of that team.

After three and a half years of enquiries, I now learn that I will not be able to do such a book. Naturally I am disappointed, since I find the two topics fascinating ones, and a book dealing with them would have made a big contribution to the field of film studies. It would have been welcomed by the loyal fans who have been following Peter Jackson’s film adaptations for so long. Indeed, I know from many kind comments on the message boards of TheOneRing.net and elsewhere that fans enjoyed my first book and were hoping for a second.

Now that I know I will not be tackling a second book, I’m going to stop posting new entries on this blog. I’ll be turning my full attention to other projects. One of these is a book-length analysis of stylistic and narrative techniques in Tolkien’s two hobbit novels. That’s already well underway, and I have over 150 manuscript pages drafted. Some of you are aware that I am also an Egyptologist. I’m in the research stage of a large book project on the statuary of the Amarna period. I am primarily a film historian, and will keep my husband’s and my two textbooks up to date, as well as contributing to our joint blog and tackling other film projects. I have also been asked to write a short account of the films for a reference book on Tolkien to be published by Oxford University Press.

I’m very grateful to all of you who have sent me links over the roughly four and a half years during which I have been blogging on this site. You have helped make my coverage far larger than I could have managed as a one-person operation.

I am also grateful to all the filmmakers and other people connected to the LOTR film franchise who allowed me to interview them for The Frodo Franchise. Thanks also to those who weren’t interviewed for the book but who helped me in other ways during my visits to Wellington. I am still amazed that I was able to write the book entirely as I had planned it, despite the fact that my topic was huge. My many interviewees are largely responsible for that.

As to The Hobbit, like other fans I shall follow its progress and look forward to finally seeing its two parts as the rest of Tolkien’s saga comes to the screen.

I shall leave the Frodo Franchise blog online, since it could prove useful to other researchers. It provides a pretty thorough record of the events that took place during the many delays and obstacles that the Hobbit project endured. (In particular, last year’s labor dispute and the dealings between the New Zealand government and Warner Bros. were covered here in, as I recall, 110 postings!) My email address remains at the top of the page, in case you want to get in touch.

Recently I linked to news of my interview on “Fictional Frontiers with Sohaib” and more recently to the online podcast version. Now there’s a transcript of the interview, kindly done by Deleece Cook, posted on TheOneRing.net. Thanks to all involved!

“Del Toro Films” is the official fansite for Guillermo Del Toro, run by webmaster Parker. Now Parker has started a separate page for the Hobbit project, called “The Shire” and described as “The Hobbit Movie Fan Portal.”

It’s a links site, listing Hobbit-related stories on “Del Toro Films”; “The Wire,” “Del Toro Films’s” news page; “The Labyrinth,” Parker’s blog; “TheOneRing.net”; and “The Frodo Franchise.” Thanks, Parker, for putting my blog in that select company!

I’m adding a link to the page to the list on the right. It looks like it will be well worth checking at intervals for a dose of Hobbit-y news.

I just received word that the hardcover edition of The Frodo Franchise is on sale at the University of California Press’s website. You can get it there (the price isn’t available from other sources) for $6.95. The sale lasts through October 31. You’ll need to enter a sale code, which is 09M5306. (I think those 0s are numerals, but if the code doesn’t work, try ‘em as letters.)

By the way, there’s a note that books on sale “May not have a dust jacket.” I think that’s because these days many university-press books are published without dust jackets because they mainly sell to libraries. That was not the case with The Frodo Franchise, so if you order a copy, it should come complete with the charming dust jacket illustrated above.

For those of you who have been waiting to purchase The Frodo Franchise in paperback, your chance has arrived. I note that it is available for pre-orders on Amazon. No specific date of release is listed, but in the Fall catalogue that the University of California Press sent me, it’s given as a July publication. I hope that means that those who order it now won’t have to wait long. Amazon is selling it for $12.89. (The list price is $18.95.)

[July 20: I note that the price is now listed at $14.78.]

Ordinarily when the paperback is released, the hardcover goes out of print. My editor informs me, however, that they’re making an exception for The Frodo Franchise and will keep it in print in hardcover as long as copies from the original print run last. I am delighted with the design of the book, both the dust jacket and the cloth covers (and the signatures are sewn rather than glued into the binding, which is getting less common these days, alas). It’s great that those who want hardcover copies for gift-giving or to keep in a proud place on their Tolkien shelves will still have that option.

By the way, the paperback incorporates some corrections. I was relieved to find out how few of those turned out to be needed. Mostly they are typos and misspellings. To a considerable degree, the lack of factual errors can be attributed to my wonderful interviewees, about forty of whom read manuscript chapters and offered suggestions or confirmed that they were fine as they were. I think what I’ll do, for those of you who own the hardback, is to put an errata list here on the blog. I’ll try to get around to that in the near future.

I’ve already had two people write to me about the TimesOnline story (from the May 25 Sunday Times print edition, “Hobbit movies meet dire foe in son of Tolkien,” which TheOneRing.net linked to earlier this evening.

My reaction on reading it is that this is probably a tempest in a teapot, with the Times over-dramatizing the upcoming June 6 meeting in the lawsuit the Tolkien Trust brought against New Line. The author claims that Christopher Tolkien will use the occasion to try and halt the production of The Hobbit. I don’t buy it. There’s absolutely nothing new here except the brief quotation from Christopher Tolkien (if indeed it is from him and not from some intermediary), “one last crusade.” That phrase is given no context. Who knows where it comes from? When it was said? The Times doesn’t give any indication. Obviously it’s not in the lawsuit, and the Times hasn’t interviewed Christopher for this story. The rest of the description of Christopher’s putative “crusade” comes from the text of the original lawsuit, in which Christopher is one of the plaintiffs. more »

Andrew Higgins has posted a positive review of The Frodo Franchise on his blog, “Wotan’s Musings.” Andrew is a student of the “ancient and medieval languages of Europe,” as well as of the “linguistic works and art languages of J. R. R. Tolkien.” Since it’s not a film-oriented site, I won’t add it to the blogroll, but those who are interested in those subjects might want to have a look.

The review also deals with Allan Turner’s new collection, The Silmarillion Thirty Years On. My copy of that just arrived from Amazon this week, and I haven’t read it yet, but Andrew’s review makes it sound interesting.

Kent Williams, film reviewer for Isthmus here in Madison, interviewed me a few weeks ago. The result is in the current print issue (February 21) and available on its website.

Part I: www.henryjenkins.org/2007/08/the_frodo_franchise_an_intervi.html

Part II: www.henryjenkins.org/2007/08/the_frodo_franchise_an_intervi_1.html

Part III: www.henryjenkins.org/2007/08/the_frodo_franchise_an_intervi_2.html

www.theonering.net/perl/newsview/6/1186444191