Word: tolkien
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...first weekend alone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets cleared $88 million. Think Star Trek: Nemesis is going to come close to that? Harry hasn't done badly at the bookstore either, having moved a total of 77 million copies in the U.S. so far, while Tolkien's works sold 11 million copies in the U.S. in 2001 alone. The online fantasy game EverQuest pulls in more than $5 million a month from its half a million subscribers, and the fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering boasts 7 million players. The business of fantasy has become a multibillion-dollar...
...strangest thing about it is, we've been here before. It all started with a little-known Oxford professor whose specialty was the West Midland dialect of Middle English. Beginning with The Hobbit, a story he invented in the early 1930s to amuse his children, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's novels first became merely popular and then turned into a phenomenon. When a pirate paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings was published in the U.S. in 1965, it and other versions sold more than a million copies within a year. GANDALF FOR PRESIDENT buttons appeared on wide late...
...moviegoers who embraced that other fantasy franchise launched a year ago, Lord of the Rings. The competition between Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter - the sibling rivals of the AOL Time Warner corporate family - is intense. Last year's Fellowship of the Ring, the first of three J.R.R. Tolkien-based movies released by the company's New Line division, came in second at the box office behind Harry Potter. Unlike Potter, however, it ended up on numerous critics' best-of-the-year lists and received 13 Oscar nominations. This time it's widely assumed in Hollywood that Lord...
...Buddha found enlightenment. Others are less well known: the Montezuma cypress in Tule, Mexico, 140 ft. high and 190 ft. in girth, which "wraps itself around you with its huge, bare brown arms"; the troll-like red tingle in a forest in Western Australia that resembles something out of Tolkien; and the Bavarian "dancing lime," whose pruned and propped-up bottom branches can support an orchestra. "The message is subtle," he says. "We all love trees, but we shouldn't take them for granted...
Summerland adapts Norse mythology, Native American folklore, American fables and Homeric myth, in addition to Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, to teach the enduring children's book lessons about finding strength within yourself. Like Sammy Clay, the self-doubting hero of Kavalier & Clay, Ethan goes through much of the book convinced that he is not up to the task assigned to him. Chabon himself has talked about feeling like a fraud sometimes, even as the reviews and prizes poured in. But the beauty of writing as an occupation is that personal anxiety just gives you one more way into your characters...