Noble Smith's Blog

Estimate, compare, distinguish, discuss, and trace to its principle sources…Everything.

—J.R.R. Tolkien

The above quote is from a spoof exam that J.R.R. Tolkien created for his fellow Inklings—the group of writers at Oxford, including the Narnia Chronicles author C.S. Lewis, with whom Tolkien met regularly to discuss their literary works. The original handwritten version of this “exam” was displayed as part of the Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth exhibition put on by the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 2018. The exhibit included, amongst many other treasures, Tolkien’s original watercolors for The Hobbit, his little writing desk and paints (with a cartoon of Smaug drawn on a slip of paper), a table-sized 3D/ holographic projected animated map of Middle-earth, letters, doodles, rare Tolkien family photographs and, as my son declared happily soon after we entered the exhibition chamber: “Dad, they’ve even got Tolkien’s tobacco pipes!”

I think that many of us who love to travel are craving the roads that go “ever ever on” like Bilbo so wistfully recited about in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Since Covid lockdown has prevented my family and myself from pretty much going anywhere ever on during the last six months other than to the grocery store, I wanted to share the story about the trip we made two years ago to Oxford, England for that incredible Tolkien exhibition at the Bodleian Library.

(If you aren’t a diehard Tolkien fan this story will probably be as boring as an Ent’s tale, so dear readers, this is your chance to bail out. Or if you want to read my travel guide post from 2016 for doing a one-day speed-run of Tolkien’s Oxford, click here. And if you want to read this blog with my accompanying photos, click here.)

The exhibition’s once-in-a-lifetime experience cemented my love for Tolkien in purest mithril, as well as cultivated my longstanding infatuation for the ancient and magnificent city of Oxford—a place I had first visited in the early 80s as a wide-eyed thirteen-year-old from the dreary suburbs of the Pacific Northwest on a quest to see the city where my hero J.R.R. Tolkien had spent most of his adult life; and which I have been back to visit again half a dozen times over the past 4 decades.

When my wife and I first heard there was going to be a major Tolkien exhibition at the Bodleian Library, we decided without hesitation to go there and take the kids. She and I had visited “The city of dreaming spires” together twenty years ago. (By the way, is there a city on the planet with a more evocative nickname than Oxford’s? The place where I grew up should have been called “The town of reeking paper mills.”) So I quickly made the various travel arrangements and, most importantly, ordered our free tickets to the exhibition from the Bodleian’s online reservation system—4 visitations on 4 separate days. (We actually ended going more times than that, squeezing in at odd times of the day when there weren’t huge lines.)

Our kids, who were 13 and 8 at the time of this trip had never been to England. And they were incredibly excited because they were (and still are) massive Tolkien fans. I had indoctrinated them each into Middle-earth by reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings out loud to them over the years, and these nightly readings to them will always be some of my fondest memories. By the way, it takes about 7 months to read LotR out loud to a child if you’re doing half an hour of bedtime reading every night, and I have done this twice. So, my kids knew far more about Tolkien than I did at their respective ages.

The trip to get to Oxford was long: a nearly ten our flight, then a 3 hour plus wait at customs (with a son who was heinously sick after gorging himself on a breakfast of Fuego Takis and Sour Patch Kids), a Heathrow Express train that broke down en route stranding us on the high speed rails for over two more hours in a sweltering car with no air conditioning (it was 95 degrees/35 celsius that day), another delayed train to get to Paddington Station, and then a final train to Oxford. (Note: The fastest and easiest way to get to Oxford from Heathrow is the plain old bus or “coach” as they are called in the UK which I took the following year from the airport to Oxford without a hitch). And when we finally got to Oxford in the afternoon—nearly 24 hours after we had left Seattle—worn out, cranky, hungry and sleep deprived, we were met with Airbnb shenanigans that forced us to relocate to a hotel with quite possibly the last suite available that could accommodate a family of four in the insanely crowded city of Oxford at the height of tourist season. It cost a small fortune in dragon gold.

But it was all worth it.

That first visit to the exhibition the day after arriving was simply overwhelming, and I was glad I had planned for us to stay in Oxford for a week so we could really soak everything up without being rushed. The exhibit room at the Bodleian was small—less than a thousand square feet. But it was crammed with rare Tolkien ephemera, some of which I had never even heard of before, let alone seen.

One of the artifacts that blew my mind was a document created by Tolkien: a letter written by King Elessar (Aragorn’s Gondorian name) to Sam, penned in the most beautiful Elvish script, and sent to Sam years after the events of the War of the Ring. Before the Maker of Middle-earth exhibition, this letter had never before been shown to the public (a facsimile of this might have been planned to be included in the original publication of The Return of the King, but for some reason it was never used and is now part of the Tolkien collection at Marquette University, donated by Tolkien’s son Christopher).

Or to see the row of Tolkien’s The Hobbit watercolors under glass—all of the author’s paintings from the original publication. It was amazing to peer at these up close—you could see the printers’ alignment marks still pasted to the margins. I especially loved the painting of Hobbiton, still vibrant after nearly a hundred years, with its tiny details of hobbit hole doorknobs and a minute road sign bearing the name “Hill” pointing toward Bag End.

And the maps! To see the first map of the Shire sketched in 1938 with notes on the back about a hobbit called Bingo Baggins setting off for an adventure with his two nephews and the inchoate thought “Ring must eventually go back to Maker.” And Tolkien’s original drawing of the Mines of Moria. Or his very modern-looking cover art sketch (again, never used) of a sinister Sauron with his outstretched hand seeking for the ring.

But I was gobsmacked by a simple sheet of paper: Tolkien’s original hand-written title page with the title The Magic Ring with a single line drawn through it; and beneath it the words The Lord of the Rings written in Tolkien’s elegant script. With a relic like this you get to be a witness to literary history and the potential alternate pathways the story could have taken. (Did you know that the character of Strider was originally written as a hobbit?) And did I mention that the original One Ring to Rule Them All verse was also on display? Meticulously inscribed by Tolkien in English and Tengwar!

In between visits to the exhibition there were many other places to explore in and around Oxford (both Tolkien-inspired and otherwise), and copious amounts of food to be eaten (English breakfast, fish and chips, etc.). We hoofed it so many miles every day that my son starting calling the town “Walksford.”

One day we took the incredible guided tour of the Merton College Library—the oldest “continuously functioning” library used by university students in the entire world. Merton is the college where Tolkien became a professor in 1945, and I could just imagine him climbing the old worn stone stairs to peruse the tomes in this over 600-year-old temple for bibliophiles. Afterwards, we stood in the cool shadow of the Fitzjames Arch, reading the scores of names of Merton College students who had died during the First World War etched into the wall. Tolkien must have walked past here every day and thought of all the dear friends he had lost in that catastrophe.

We made several visits to the Oxford Botanic Garden where Tolkien used to stroll to from Merton College in order to visit his favorite tree (which sadly was destroyed in a storm several years ago). We also took a trip to Wolvercote Cemetery to pay homage at Tolkien’s and his wife Edith’s grave. Here, standing under umbrellas in a summer rain, I recited Bilbo’s poem “The Road Goes Ever On.” And then we read the notes that people had left to moulder on the mound—messages from fans who had come there before us who wanted to leave message about how much Tolkien’s works had changed their lives for the better forever. We ate at the Eagle and Child pub in the snugs (the cozy wood paneled seats at the front of the pub) where the Inklings used to hang out and chat. We even walked to 20 Northmoor Road—the house where Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and much of The Lord of the Rings—and read the blue plaque embedded in the wall stating that Tolkien had lived there. When I went back to the UK in 2019, this modest house was on the market, listed at 6 million US dollars.

Back at the exhibition, there was always something new to study that we had missed on a previous visit. Like the manuscript page from the exciting chapter The Ride of the Rohirrim written in Tolkien’s superb hand—the section near the end where Theoden calls on his riders to head for Gondor, and he seizes a horn from his banner-bearer and blows such a blast that he bursts the horn! You could almost see the energy and the force radiating from the words. Tolkien himself said about The Lord of the Rings “It is written in my life-blood, such as that is, thick or thin; and I can no other.” Yes. I understand. The exhibit proved that it was indeed written in his life-blood, and it also showed without a shadow of a doubt that John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a literary genius as well as a masterful artist, designer and even creator of fonts and his own logo.

On the final day of our Oxford stay, we got up very early and walked to Pembroke College where Tolkien’s career as a Fellow in the city of dreaming spires began (he had been a student at Exeter College a few blocks away from Pembroke before the Great War). The door warden said that they didn’t usually let tourists peek inside the quad, but since we were Tolkien fans, she let us have a quick look. You can see for yourself that the place, like all of Oxford, radiated a kind of magic. I could just imagine Tolkien walking across this quad in the morning light, mumbling excitedly to himself “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

I highly recommend the exhibition’s companion book Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth by Catherine McIlwaine and published by The Bodleian Library.

If you want to read my new sci-fantasy novel Draxinger (about an Oxford professor during World War I who gets conscripted by a secret organization that believes he has magical powers) click here.

To read this blog on my website click here.

I had to take a hiatus from writing my Shire Wisdom blog for about five months. I had a weird and scary thing happen to my heart (and I'll write about that in a blog post soon). But I'm all better now, thanks to my family and the fact that I followed what I had learned while writing The Wisdom of the Shire! (Author, heal thyself!)

I was also deep into writing the second book in my Warrior Trilogy. The first book hit the stores on June 11th, and I just got back from Greece where I was finishing up research for Book 3 and meeting with my Greek publisher. You can read about my amazing trip to the very real place where my story takes place here.

A lot of people have asked me why someone like me--a lover of Tolkien and fantasy--would write a historical fiction series. What does it have to do with Tolkien? Well, reading Tolkien as a boy piqued my interest in ancient Greek mythology. I had a teacher, a priest in fact, who told me that the fall of Númenor from The Silmarillion was based on the legend of Atlantis. It intrigued me to think that Tolkien had learned a story (probably when he was very young) that grew inside him like a magic tree and evolved into something uniquely his own.

Delving into Homer for the first time (which I did so after reading my own version of the Iliad, aka The Lord of the Rings) I was struck by the similarity in the "high style" of some of Tolkien's writing, especially the battle scenes. In fact, if you read The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien there is this wonderful quote in Letter 142: "I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer." --J.R.R. Tolkien, 1953

In The Wisdom of the Shire I wrote about the Greek legend of the Ring of Gyges and how this story--a ring of invisibility that brings with it a terrible curse--most likely influenced the invention of Sauron's One Ring.

Tolkien even coined an important literary word using Greek roots: Eucatastrophe. It means "good catastrophe"--a turn of events for the protagonist where everything suddenly goes from utter crap and doom to rainbows and awesomeness (think the finale of The Return of the King and the fall of Barad-dûr).

When I was in college I started reading the ancient Greek playwrights, and then the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus. The real world of ancient Greece, especially the so-called "Golden Age" of 5th century BC Athens, started to pull me in. For years I read everything about the Greeks that I could get my hands on, scouring used bookstores for obscure tomes and scholarly treatises.

About ten years ago I was hired to write a treatment for a documentary set during the Peloponnesian War (the bloody 30-year-long battle between Sparta and Athens). While rereading Thucydides I came across a story that I had glossed over the first time I had seen it. It was the tale of an independent and democratic city-state called Plataea that was invaded in a sneak attack at the outset of the Peloponnesian War. The heroic and clever way that the Plataeans fought off the invaders, and the subsequent epic siege of their citadel (which became the longest siege in the history of the world) struck me as a story that needed to be told. And so I started working on my novel Sons of Zeus .


Ten years later that book is sitting on the shelves in bookstores and libraries around the country. And I am incredibly proud of this story of love, courage and sacrifice. I never would have written this series if I hadn't read J.R.R. Tolkien's works. So that's how a fantasy author influenced me to write a work of historical fiction. And I could rewrite Tolkien's quote about the Classics like this: "I was brought up in Middle-earth, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Tolkien."

The Warrior Trilogy

Sons of Zeus , the first episode in my epic trilogy about the bloody onset of the Peloponnesian War, is coming this June 14th in hardcover. This week I will receive the first pass pages in the mail. This is a nearly 500 page (printout) of the manuscript that has been amended with all of the copyeditor's corrections, as well as my additions and corrections. I will sit down at my desk for three days and pore over this version, comparing it to the previous printout in my possession, making certain that all of the changes were implemented correctly by the person doing the digital typeset version of the book. This should take me about 24 hours of work if I can check 1 page every 2.5 minutes! What's fascinating is that it's an old school process at this point: paper and pencil marks and no computers.

Here's what I think about copyeditors: they are indispensable. But here's a warning for all authors who have never had a pro copyeditor go over your manuscript. The first time you get a copyedited version of your book back from the publisher, and you see all of the red pencil marks on the pages, you will feel like an illiterate hillbilly and question whether or not you should even be writing a book at all, let alone a trilogy! Almost every author I know has had this experience. The great Patrick O'Brian (author of the Aubrey/Maturin Series) was an aberration. One of O'Brian's editors told a story about how O'Brian got back the copyedited version of a manuscript for one of his books, and the prickly author was enraged to find that the dastardly copyeditor had altered one thing: he'd changed a semicolon into a comma! (O'Brian promptly changed it back.)

The galleys (the advance press paperback copies) will be printed based on the first pass pages of Sons of Zeus, and these paperback versions of the book will start going out to reviewers at the end of February (and they will contain, no doubt, several typos). I will get to look at the manuscript one more time before it finally goes to the printers. There should be 0 typos in the final version. I hope.

It's a nerve wracking process, to say the least. I'm always finding typos in books. Now I know why. It's damned hard to get a perfectly clean copy of a novel. Especially one as long as this one is (over 125k words). My cousin recently read the manuscript and found a typo that had existed in all 20 or so versions of the manuscript: it had existed for about 8 years! Dozens of people have read the book, and nobody had caught it until my cousin (a linguist) saw it. And the typo was on the first page of Chapter 1. Here it is:

Nikias, in stark contract to his grandfather, had altered much over the last decade.

Did you see the typo?  The word I had messed up was contrast. I had accidentally typed contract instead. When everyone read the sentence, their brains (and mine) just changed the c to an s to have it make sense.

I've put a massive number of man hours into Sons of Zeus. Not just in the editing process, but also in the research. I read over 100 books about ancient Greece, and even taught myself to read the ancient Greek language. I first started writing the book ten years ago while I was working a feature documentary film about the ancient Greek playwright Euripides. (That film eventually became Jessica Yu's award-winning Protagonist, which I co-executive produced. Protagonist is one of the few films ever made, outside of Greece, that has spoken dialogue in ancient Greek.)

Sometimes research can mess you up, however. If you become too married to details, your historical fiction (or even fantasy) story can become really boring. The first version of my book was wildly different from the one that is going to be published this June. That first book was, in fact, quite dull. It was like something written by a stuffy college professor. Too full of factoids and digressions where I felt compelled to explain commonplace objects or social customs (or even the details of architecture). I basically threw away that first manuscript of the book and started over from scratch. And then I threw that second version away too. So I've actually written about 1,500 pages to get 500 pages.

Once I started on that third version of the book it really came to life. I had done all of the research and I'd finally come up with a voice that was my own. The world that I had been inhabiting in my imagination for so many years had finally gelled. Now I'm 3/4 of the way done with the sequel (Spartans at the Gates) and I can't seem to type fast enough to keep up with the story that's pouring out of my brain. I even wrote a five thousand word short story (a prequel to Sons of Zeus) that will be put out as an ebook teaser by my publisher (Thomas Dunne Books) two months before the publication of Sons of Zeus.

This ebook short story is called The One-armed Warrior (see image above) and it's about how the protagonist of Sons of Zeus makes a very dangerous enemy of an older warrior a year before the action of Sons of Zeus begins. What's so cool about ebooks is that you can release these short stories, or prequels, or even spinoff tales without the hassle or expense of printing them as a physical book and shipping them off to bookstores. The way publishers are adding ebook bonus materials to their traditionally printed book catalogues is in its infancy. But I think it's going to be an exciting amalgam of old school and new technology. Someday I hope to have an enhanced ebook version of my trilogy with all of the short stories/supplementary material combined with the three novels.

Just imagine what J.R.R. Tolkien could have done with this technology? He had all of the supplementary materials (his backstory The Silmarillion, his languages, his poems and unfinished tales and appendices). But he had to type everything out by hand on a manual typewriter.* It's a remarkably tedious process if you've ever tried to write a book that way. I learned to type on a manuel typewriter. It's physically exhausting. Tolkien used to dream that someday he would be wealthy enough from his writing to have a special custom typewriter made that would allow him to type in Elvish script. Alas, he never got to experience the pleasure of creating stories with high-tech typewriters (aka computers), nor did he get to see all of the cool fonts based on the languages of Middle-earth. He would have loved them!

If you are interested in reading The One-armed Warrior, click here to "Like" it. It will be available in a couple of months on Nook, Kobo and Kindle. And I hope you don't find any typos. Sons of Zeus will be available in print and ebook June 14th in the United States, Brazil and Greece.

*By the way, Christopher Tolkien still owns and works on his father's typewriter; and he used it to type out the manuscripts for The Silmarillion and the 12-volume History of Middle Earth.

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

September 21st is the 75th anniversary of the publication of The Hobbit. J.R.R. Tolkien, as the story goes, scribbled the first line of his now famous book while taking a much-needed pause from grading English papers. The words came to him in a flash of insight—an epiphany that would change literature forever and create a whole new genre of serious fantasy, leaving behind “the gimcrack of conventional modern fairy-tales” that Tolkien so despised (think early Disney films).

But The Hobbit would never have been published if not for the recommendation of a ten-year-old. Rayner Unwin, son of the publisher Stanley Unwin, was handed a manuscript of The Hobbit by his father and paid a shilling to write a report on it (one shilling was decent pocket-change for a kid back in the 30’s). Rayner enjoyed Tolkien’s book and wrote, “…it is good and should appeal to all children between the ages of 5 and 9.” And that was enough for his father. It is one of the great ironies of publishing history that an Oxford professor’s book was given the go-ahead based simply upon the vanilla recommendation of a schoolboy.

In 1937 Hitler was on the rise in Europe. The Japanese invaded China. The Spanish Civil War raged. The inaugural NFL game was played. Charlie Chaplain’s first “talkie” motion picture came out in theaters. And The Hobbit was printed with an initial run of just 1,500 copies—predating the release of Disney’s Snow White (a film with seven whistling “Dwarfs” as opposed to thirteen ferocious “Dwarves”) by exactly three months.

The next year Tolkien started work on his unnamed “sequel” to The Hobbit. He sent the first chapter to his publisher who, of course, passed “A Long-expected Party” to none other than young Rayner who was now eleven. The publisher-in-training enjoyed the chapter but complained there was too much “hobbit-talk.” Ha!

Nearly fifteen years went by. Tolkien worked diligently on The Lord of the Rings all that time, typing out the entire 600,000 word manuscript by himself. Twice. He found a publisher, and then became furious when the publisher kept stalling on the release date, and he withdrew the manuscript in a fit of pique that he soon regretted most terribly. Thankfully Rayner—now an adult and working for the family publishing company—reappeared on the scene with the good timing of a wizard, and asked if he might see the manuscript. The rest is publishing history.

Rayner shepherded Tolkien through the arduous process of getting The Lord of the Rings ready for publication. It was Rayner’s idea to divide the massive book into three parts, much to Tolkien’s annoyance (Peter Jackson is not the first to split one of Tolkien’s books into a trilogy). The author’s exchanges with Rayner (in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien) during this period are a wonderful and amusing window into their fascinating relationship. Tolkien is like a cantankerous but lovable Bilbo dealing with Frodo, arguing about the titles for the books (he did not like the name The Two Towers one bit), and complaining comically about finalizing the map of Middle-earth, “This map is hell!”

About a year and a half before Tolkien died he sent a letter to Rayner saying, “Everything you do for me fills me with gratitude.” He asked Rayner to please start addressing him as "Ronald"—his Christian name. This was a great honor and a mark of respect coming from someone brought up in Tolkien’s world, where even dear friends called each other by their initials: an ingrained holdover of Victorian formality. Rayner was not only Tolkien’s very old friend, he was also his literary champion and, fortunately (for all of us Tolkien fans) he had had the good sense as a ten-year-old to approve of The Hobbit. If he had not, the manuscript might have spent the last seventy-five years collecting dust, rather than living all this time in the hearts and minds of tens of millions of fans around the world.

For more about Tolkien, The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings, and my book The Wisdom of the Shire visit my blog at: www.shirewisdom.com

There’s been a heap of uproar recently about how on earth (or Middle-earth) Peter Jackson & Co. will manage to stretch out the plot of The Hobbit to three films. Jackson has made it known that he and his co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens (with some Guillermo del Toro tidbits leftover from his earlier collaboration with the Kiwis) are using the appendices from The Lord of the Rings to tell the story of what Gandalf was doing in the four months he was apart from Bilbo and the Dwarves after he left them at “the Gates of Mirkwood.”

This blog is an attempt on my part (and purely speculative) to make an educated guess at the plot of the three films. If you hate spoilers, read no more, because I might just stumble upon a few of those spoilers as I Hobbit-hypothesize, as well as touch upon some of the plot points that have already been mentioned by Peter Jackson and his crew.

First off, I must state that I think three films isn’t enough time to tell The Hobbit, let alone Peter Jackson’s proposed back and forth juxtaposed tale of Bilbo and the Dwarves (with Smaug) on one side and Gandalf and Legolas (battling the Necromancer) on the other. I love long adaptations. In my opinion the greatest adaptation of a novel ever is John Mortimer’s miniseries teleplay for Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited starring Jeremy Irons (1981). What makes it so great? The dialogue is almost verbatim from the book and nearly every single scene is kept. The running time of Brideshead is over 12 hours for a book that’s about 350 pages. The Hobbit could easily be given a twelve-hour adaption for its 380 or so pages (depending on your edition) and still keep me riveted.

Back to speculating on the story of The Hobbit Trilogy. Years before the action of The Hobbit begins (over 90 years, in fact) Gandalf had been investigating an ancient fortress called Dol Guldur in the southern part of Mirkwood forest. This evil place was rumored to have been built by Sauron after he’d been defeated during the War of the Last Alliance (i.e. after he got his precious Ring cut off his hand by Isildur), and an entity known only as “the Necromancer” was said to be living there. What Gandalf found in the dungeons of Dol Guldur was a Dwarf who had been tortured for so long he’d gone mad. This was Thorin Oakenshield’s father, Thráin. Thráin gave to Gandalf a map to the Lonely Mountain and a key to the secret door that leads to Smaug’s chamber. (How the crazed Thráin kept the map and key hidden in the dungeons of the Necromancer is anyone’s guess. A body cavity search by an Orc would not be a pleasant experience!)

This set piece alone (Gandalf sneaking into Dol Guldur, finding Thráin, battling his way out against a host of Orcs and perhaps even Ringwraiths while discovering an evil entity who may or may not be Sauron) could take up an entire episode of a miniseries. It will probably only get ten minutes of screen time as either a flashback (Gandalf explaining to Thorin how he came to have his father’s map and key) or quite possibly even the prologue to the first film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

The first real opportunity in the screen adaptation for Peter Jackson to fit in additional material (that falls within the timeline of the book) is when Bilbo and the Dwarves arrive at Rivendell. In the trailer we get a glimpse of Galadriel speaking to a troubled looking Gandalf, and I can imagine that Gandalf has told her he’s worried that the Necromancer is indeed Sauron and that he’s rebuilt Dol Guldur and is growing an army of Orcs. Perhaps at this point in the film Gandalf, Elrond and Galadriel have a little council where Gandalf tells them they need to enlist his fellow wizard for guidance: none other than Saruman the White.

Gandalf might also tell them he’s been drawn, for some inexplicable reason, to the North--to Mirkwood, Dol Guldur, and the Lonely Mountain--thus giving a solid impetus for the wizard bringing together Thorin & Co. and Bilbo: a motivating force that’s missing from Tolkien’s book. Galadriel most likely would agree with Gandalf about the danger of Dol Guldur. We must remember that she lives in Lothlórien. Her Elven kingdom is only a hundred miles away from Mirkwood and Dol Guldur. The far-seeing Elves could observe, from their high treetop flets, the barren hillside rising from Mirkwood forest upon which Dol Guldur is built. Galadriel would be concerned about what is going on in Mirkwood too, and possibly has already made some sort of connection between Sauron and Smaug the dragon.

This is where the casting of Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug/the Necromancer comes into play. My guess is that in Peter Jackson’s version of the story the Necromancer (aka Sauron) can possess Smaug the Dragon in the same way Saruman the White possessed King Théoden in the film version of The Two Towers. In Peter Jackson’s version Sauron is using Smaug like a living palantir—a way to view a remote part of Middle-earth that becomes activated by the presence of the Ring. Sort of like a One Ring detector. (The dragons were created by Morgoth, Sauron's master, to serve as his weapons in the First Age.) In the book Smaug can sense Bilbo’s presence even when he is wearing the Ring and invisible (though the Hobbit reeks of Dwarf and pony which is enough to wake up any dragon). It’s a much more sinister film device, however, if Smaug isn’t merely a big lizard lolling on a heap of gold, but rather a tool of Sauron that has the potential to mesmerize, trap and kill Bilbo and get the Ring back for the Dark Lord. Smaug, in the book, is a clever and fiendish creature. If the voice emanating from his dragon’s mouth is the same as the Necromancer/Sauron, well, this just makes him all the more terrifying.

The next opportunity for the filmmakers to concoct another key scene for Gandalf (using the appendices as a source) comes soon after Bilbo and the Dwarves arrive at Beorn the shapeshifter’s house and Gandalf mysteriously disappears for a spell. Where did he go? Get ready to meet Radagast the Brown, the Istari who has gone native, as played by the great Scottish actor Sylvester McCoy.

To be continued in Hypothetical Hobbit Plotting (Part 2)

To learn more about me and my book The Wisdom of the Shire visit my blog at www.shirewisdom.com

Are meals at your house a hasty and chaotic event? Do members of your family fight at the table? Have you ever made a meal and not been thanked for all the hard work you put into it?

If so, you and your family might want to take after the Shire-folk and break bread like a Hobbit.

Hobbits love to eat. But they especially love eating together. Meals for them are a pleasant, joyful time and they’re thankful for every meal they get, especially during those times of respite from the turmoil of their adventures.

When the Hobbits arrive at Tom Bombadil’s house after their harrowing time in the Old Forest, they’re welcomed inside and taken to a bedroom where they can wash up (just like little kids coming in from playing outside). Then they’re given a “long and merry” meal with Tom and his wife Goldberry, and are stuffed by the end of it (which is quite a difficult thing to do with a Hobbit).

When Frodo and his friends get to Bree after the terrors of the Barrow Downs and the threat of Ringwraiths on the road, they check into The Prancing Pony and are shown to a cozy little room with a cheerful fire burning on the hearth, and a table spread with a white cloth where they proceed to stuff themselves with cheese, cold meats, bread and soup. They feel “refreshed and encouraged” afterwards, which is how you should feel after a meal.

If anybody can tell me a work of fiction that mentions food and eating more than The Lord of the Rings (along with The Hobbit) please let me know. Food is, without question, one of the more important themes of Tolkien’s stories. We learn what Gandalf devours when he returns to Beorn’s house after a little jaunt (two loaves of bread smothered in butter, honey and clotted cream plus a quart of mead); what’s on the desert menu at The Prancing Pony (it’s blackberry tart); and the provisions Merry and Pippin manage to scrounge from Saruman’s storerooms (salted pork, rashers of bacon, bread with butter and honey, wine and beer).

Tolkien was, apparently, obsessed with food. He was orphaned at the age of twelve, and must have been deprived of many a home cooked meal. Then he had to live in the squalid trenches during WWI where men existed on a few ounces of stale (or rotten) food each day. By the time he was working on The Lord of the Rings, England was at war again and even tea, god forbid!, was rationed (Tolkien liked his tea with honey, by the way).

Hobbits are the original foodies. They are obsessed with mushrooms and the best beer (The Golden Perch, we are told, had a legendary ale). They make themselves sumptuous birthday party feasts, and going away part feasts, and probably even party planning feasts.

But they’ll take what they can get and they’re happy for it. They actually love the delicious and nutritious lembas, the Elven waybread given to them in Lothlórien (which is like the Middle-earth version of a Luna Bar). Merry and Pippin aren’t above scrounging through the flotsam and jetsam of Isengard for a meal (and a good smoke to boot). And Sam even brings along his own camp cooking gear including pans, a wooden spoon and a precious box of salt. He makes a stew of some rabbits (captured by Gollum) with some scrounged herbs thrown in, and this meager meal “seemed a feast.”

That’s because the Hobbits are grateful for whatever they can get, and even though they’re greedy by nature, they’re happy to share. They would never eat alone when they could eat together, talking merrily and enjoying one another’s company.

“Peaceful, Happy, Grateful.” That is what’s written in crayon over the entrance to our dining room. My son inscribed the words one day while I lifted him up so he could reach that high place. We’d decided, as a family, that those three words were really important to us when having a meal together. And we wanted to remember them every time we sat down.

Peaceful because life is hectic and meals should be a time to relax.

Happy because we’re all together.

Grateful because there are a lot of people in the world who don’t have enough to eat.

We try as best as we can to always eat as a family. And we make every meal that we’re lucky enough to share together something that nourishes our souls as well as our bodies.

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The rumors have been flying for weeks—ever since Comic-con—that Peter Jackson was going to turn The Hobbit into a trilogy instead of the originally slated duology (which I know is not a real word). Jackson had first floated the idea before Comic-con to mixed reactions. But he must have made up his mind after he’d shown a standing room only crowd of people his “reel” of The Hobbit (about twelve minutes of footage) and watched the audience go berserk. And I’m talking gang-of-hungry-Hobbits-at-a-free-beer-and-mushroom-eating-contest berserk. The audience couldn’t get enough. People, it turns out, still love Hobbits.

Now cynics will say that Peter Jackson has a billion reasons for doing a third Hobbit movie, and each one of those reasons is one US dollar. Because The Lord of the Rings trilogy netted about a billion dollars per film after all was said and done (combined box office receipts and the three different DVD versions—theatrical, director’s cuts and Blu-ray).

But I think the reason Peter Jackson wants to do three movies is simple. They’ve shot so much fantastic extra material, and they think the story is so rich that it deserves a third movie to adequately tell the tale. We have to remember that Jackson & Co. have been using the appendices to The Lord of the Rings to fill in the narrative gap for when Gandalf leaves Bilbo and the Dwarves at the entrance to Mirkwood, and heads south to fight the Necromancer at his fortress of Dol Guldur. (Gandalf doesn’t return to the narrative of The Hobbit until Bilbo shows up at the Elven-king’s camp with the Arkenstone, almost four months later.) I’ve talked to many Tolkien fans over the years who’ve all speculated about what might have happened in Tolkien’s most famous “offscreen” story. And I can’t wait to see what the Kiwis come up with.

We all crave stories of heroism and adventure. But there’s something so wonderful and, well, human, about a frightened guy like Bilbo who leaves his sheltered existence, finds his courage, and yet keeps his Hobbitness (i.e. his humanity) intact. That’s why we love Hobbits and Tolkien’s stories so much, and why I am absolutely thrilled that they’re going to make three films. The funny thing is, someday we’ll probably get the director’s cuts of the Hobbit Trilogy and sit around complaining about how they cut so many great scenes from the theatrical release, just like we did when The Lord of the Rings director’s cuts were released!

The Hobbit 3: Return of the Hobbit. Bring ‘em all on. And then will somebody please do The Silmarillion?

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Back in the day (and I'm talking about the early eighties) Rush fans like me used to get a lot of guff from rockers about Rush's song "Rivendell" which was considered to be a very lame tune by people who listened to bands like AC/DC or Ted "Cat Scratch" Nugent. Every Tolkien fan I knew, however, loved "Rivendell." The boys--Geddy, Neil and Alex--weren't afraid to let their Middle-earth freak flag fly, and we loved them for it. The song was on the album Fly By Night (1975), which also featured the classic fantasy rock song "By-Tor & the Snow Dog" which my friends and I still belt out in our bad Geddy Lee voices when we've had a few pints. It's been over 35 years since that album came out, and Rush is still going strong. My three childhood buddies, all of whom were Tolkien enthusiasts, are going to see Rush live with me in Seattle this November. And Rush's new album is an awesome blend of speculative fiction storytelling (and soon to be a novel by Kevin J. Anderson), genius arrangements, and kick ass musicianship. Rush is an inspiration. They're doing some of their best work as they're heading into their sixties. Maybe they're like long-lived Hobbits and they'll still be around when they're in their hundreds, just like Bilbo (who left Rivendell for the last time when he was 131 years old).

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