Mint Brook Meadow Teas has obtained a license from Tolkien Enterprises to use the Hobbit brand and characters from that book in order to market their tea. Hobbit Tea is made in their facility (it is impossible to call it a factory) in Dalton - a small village near Wooster, Ohio. Dante and […]

On the left menu bar of TCG pages you now have a small widget that will translate the current page you are on into one of a wide variety of languages supported by Google Translate. The service is far from perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but for those of you for whom […]

The New York Times just posted an article about the phrase “Cellar Door” (that is, in fact, the title of their piece). The print edition of this piece is supposed to appear in print on February 14, 2010, on page 16 of the Sunday Magazine.
The article refers to the movie “Donnie Darko”, in which […]

UPDATE
The new dates are
Public 9-5: Sat 14th Aug – Mon 16th Aug 2010, free entry.Invite only Preview Party: Fri 13th Aug 2010.
Please note that this is the same weekend as the “Festival in the Shire” event. The next Cotswalds gathering in Moreton-in-Marsh has been postponed temporarily. The delay will allow the new Hilary Tolkien book […]

The Cimmerian has just posted a very useful and lengthy review by Brian Murphy of the 1998 heavy metal album Nightfall of Middle-earth by Blind Guardian.
A brief summary quote from the review:
Now, I know heavy metal ain’t everyone’s cup o’ tea. But if you like Tolkien you might want to give Nightfall in Middle-earth a […]

From the BBC description of the episode, “Host John Humphrys invites four contenders to answer questions in the black chair. The specialist subjects are TV westerns of the 50s and 60s, the life and work of Tolkien, the government of Gough Whitlam 1972 -1975, and the life and career of Dixie Dean.”
The specialist in this […]

Jason Fisher kindly gave me permission to reprint his blog post on the upcoming Congress. Enjoy! (And read his blog regularly!)
The schedule for the Forty-fifth International Congress on Medieval Studies, also known simply as Kalamazoo, has been published. The conference runs May 13-16, 2010 at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. One of the […]

David Miller, proprietor of The Tolkien Bookshelf has been selling Tolkien books and related materials for more than a decade, through personal contacts, eBay, ABEBooks, and now through his own website located at http://www.tolkienbookshelf.com.
His website is looking very nice, with well laid out categories and plenty of wonderful looking items featured on the homepage. […]

The Festival in the Shire Journal just released their second issue online. It is edited by Colin Duriez, and has a lot of interesting articles. While the Journal is associated with The Festival in the Shire, an event taking place next year somewhere in Wales, the Journal itself has a broad sampling of […]

Wayne and Christina have written a detailed article for LOTRPlaza that deals with the pitfalls of research, source verification, and briefly the possibility of forged “primary” sources, where TCG gets a couple of mentions in the footnotes for our discussions on forged signatures and letters. A very good read!
Their blog post on the article
The LOTRPlaza […]