The Hall of Fire

I cannot remember at all my reaction when I encountered Strider in this chapter on my first reading some 40 years ago. However, for some reason I do remember that I was extremely suspicious of Sam when he was caught eavesdropping ouside the window at the end of "The Shadow of the Past". I ...

And one from the movie:


You have my sword.

And you have my bow.

And my pants!

If either of you obtains the Rankin-Bass inspired Hobbit game, please let us know what it is like and how it plays. I'd be interested to hear about it. One thing I hope happens as the result of The Hobbit movie is a better board game based on The Hobbit than the recent one Alatar and I have. It has ...

I first read LOTR at age 13 some 41 years ago (can't believe it has been that long). One of the things I still remember is how much this chapter frightened me at the time. I had never read anything like LOTR before. The Black Riders in the Shire scared me but the Barrow Downs chapter scared me consi...

I think the easiest of the games mentioned is "The Hobbit" boardgame (assuming that Alatar and I are talking about the same game - the one we have is "The Hobbit - the Defeat of the Evil Dragon Smaug"). It is pretty much just based on luck with dice and a spinner the main determi...

Alatar, I do also have the Battles of the Third age expansion and have painted the figures to that game too. When my daughter and I play WOTR we use the expansion figures and rules. I have only played the Rohan battle expansion once (against myself) and the Pelennor expansion once (which I didn't co...

I got Tales of the Perilous Realm recently too, more for the Alan Lee art than the stories, all of which I already had apart from "Roverandom", which I need to read soon. I really love Lee's pencil sketch type drawings and would have preferred that he had used that type of illustration for...

I'd like to expand on Lord Morningstar's comments above about PJ writing "himself into a bit of a corner" concerning the size of the Rohirrim at Helm's Deep and related issues. This bothers me more and more each time I see the films. My 10 year old daughter discovered LOTR (the books and m...

One other thing I found interesting at the LOTR movie marathon was the reaction of the audience to the humor. Every joke or humorous remark on screen got a laugh, from a few folks at least. I assume that the great majority of the people in the crowd had seen the films one or more times before. With ...

Voronwë has summarized the changes in Bilbo's party speech, including the variations in the insult/compliment joke. Like Prim, I have always really liked the joke and always enjoy reading it. It is interesting that the basis of the joke, as well as the rest of the speech, was there in the first coup...

My parents still live where I grew up - off Houston Mill Road (between Lavista and Clifton). Very small world.

You grew up in Decatur, WampusCat? I grew up in DeKalb County about a mile from Emory U (with an Atlanta mailing address).

In response to your question above, Voronwë, I'm afraid I can't really think of anything I reacted to differently by seeing them all continuously in one day. This may be because I'm accustomed to watching all 3 films over 3 days, which is not too different from 3 in one day. Since I bought the ROTK ...

Hi, WampusCat. Yes, I live in the Southeast. It took about an hour and 45 minutes to drive from a little north of Atlanta, where we live, to Chattanooga Saturday morning for the LOTR film showing Saturday. My daughter can hardly avoid gaining an appreciation for Tolkien. At age 5 we read her The Hob...

Voronwë asked me to relate how I liked the all day LOTR movie showing we (my wife, 9 yr old daughter, and I) attended on Saturday. I enjoyed it even more than I expected I would. The event was very well organized. It was sold out but we arrived early enough to get great seats right in the middle of ...

Hello, everybody! Thanks for the friendly welcome. I've been lurking and reading you folks on this board and several previous ones (including Board 77, the previous Hall of Fire and TORC) pretty much daily for at least 5 years. I finally got around to registering although I don't know how much I'll ...