Well, the word “orc” appears in Bullfinch, as does “elf” and “dwarf.” Now,“dwarves”… I guess you can’t copyright a plural.
BTw, don’t forget the Type 9 Demon, the one with the flaming sword and whip. You know, “Balor”.
<nitpick> Balor is a Type VI Demon. </nitpick>
Yeah, sorry, forgot about him. Um … and I know I’m going to expose my ignorance to public ridicule here, but … um … who or what is “Bullfinch”?
Bullfinch’s Mythology, I’ll assume. In other words, Tolkien didn’t invent the word “orc”, it already existed.
Astorian, that’s true. I saw it in a rockumentary about one of my favourite bands!
That’s all I got from the article as well. This whole thread sounds like overreacting. I wouldn’t be surprised if I learned that one of the reasons for moving Shelob was so movie goers don’t compare her to the giant spider in Harry Potter.
Hmmmm…I’m not certain what you mean. The original post seemed to be complaining that the writer of the Entertainment Weekly article was assuming that Tolkien was somehow “ripping off the Harry Potter movie”. I stated that I thought that wasn’t what the article was saying. Instead, it was describing a decision by the director that had nothing to do with the writer, and that the writer was merely reporting on Peter Jackson’s movie. Do you disagree, or are you funnin’ wif me?
:smack: Speaking of overreacting…nevermind. I go to lie down. Here is where my quiet liedown time comes.
…the decision to move Shelob to the third movie was made a long time ago-something that could have been verified by the author’s of the cited stories by doing some basic research.
http://www.ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,217185~10~0~dishonlotrtwo,00.html
…multi-million decision’s aren’t made on the spur of the moment-Jackson states the reasons why Shelob was moved. People are annoyed that the story is essentially a “beat-up”-despite them knowing the fact’s (my link was from there own website for goodness sakes!) EW decided to display an article which to be completly honest, is a load of bollocks. 
The end result of their exercise is a whole lot of people-suffering from false authority syndrome-(commonly known as MOOO!!!) believe the article may be true, when in fact it’s nothing of the sort.
So it was just good timing then. I never said I was right!
And pravnik. I guess I wasn’t being clear, but I agree with you.
It is interesting, however, that fantasy movies are suddenly such high-grossers.
Hmmm . . . this seems to have been noted quite some time ago (well, at least back in November) by someone far more insightful than the EW writer:
Well, obviously the Anglo-Saxon authors who attributed the megalithic ruins they found to eald enta geweorc were using their time machines to copy from Tolkien. Whoda thunk it? :eek: