rastahomie, you can view a preliminary trailer for the Lord of the Rings movies here. It’s the official site, and last time I looked at it, it also had some cool conceptual drawings of certain key scenes. You will see what orcs look like, but they’re being pretty tight with balrogs, ents, and one or two other things. When I went to theonering.net’s panels at DragonCon in Atlanta, they said that despite the best efforts of the “spys” who send them pics and news from the film site in New Zealand, they cannot get their hands on that stuff.
The trailer, however, is very cool and worth taking a look at.
“This Ring and no other is made by the Elves
Who’d pawn their own mother to grab it themselves…”
Holy cow, no wonder I can’t remember what i ate for breakfast yeaterday. All my remaining brain cells are maxed out remembering every poem from “Bored of the Rings” which I read 20 years ago! Oh, and all the lyrics to the “Superchicken” theme song.
How goes the quest?
I’m going to read it through once more before the films are released, because I know I will never be able to run it in my head again after I see them.
And what’s this Arwen the Warrior Elf-queen movie bullshit?? Come on, she was a walk-on in the books. Whoops, better save that line for the pit.
I just this summer read The Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy. I was not aware that there are more books than those four. What’s the Silmarillion? Is that after, or a prequel?
In any event, I loved them. But the plot is definitely slow. I skipped anything in italics. All of the poems/runes. That got me through at a reasonable pace.
Good luck!
Silmarillion Warning - for the serious Middle-Earth geeks only!
The Silmarillion is written in a very scholarly manner - more like a mythology/history text than anything else. It is actually in 3 parts, of which the Silmarillion is only one. It gives you an overview of the creation myth, the First age, and the second age of Middle-Earth (LOTR and The Hobbit all take place at the end of the Third Age).
I found it very interesting, but best read as a textbook rather than a fiction. I approached it the way I approached the Kalevala, and found it dense, but well worth the time. It provided more detail on some of the matters that are touched on or alluded to in LOTR, such as the story of Beren and Luthien, and the background for the emnity between Sauron and Gondor.