I spent the morning browsing Tolkien stuff on the web. I found two things, one horrifying and one piece of truly great news.
First the horrifying thing. Shortly before the infamous Ace paperback edition of LotR was published, a guy named William Snyder bought the film rights to The Hobbit for peanuts. His screenwriter was not aware of the Lord of the Rings and introduced some rather horrid changes into the script, including the creation of a princess for Bilbo to marry. The film's financing fell through the project seemed to be doomed. Snyder had to produce a film by June 30 1966 in order to retain the rights. With the growing popularity of LotR and The Hobbit, he realized that he had a more valuable property than he had thought, so in the last month he had the screenwriter reduce the screenplay to 12 minutes, spent a month animating it and released to a single theater in on June 30, 1966. He kept the rights, which he later sold for a significant profit. This lead to the Rankin/Bass Hobbit and ultimately to the Peter Jackson films coming out this year.
Behold the first film version of the Hobbit.
And now for the great news.
A NEW TOLKIEN BOOK IS COMING OUT!!!!
The Fall of Arthur a 900 lines of alliterative verse on the Matter of Britain that Tolkien wrote on the 1930s is available for pre-order on Amazon with a release date in May 2013.
The Silmarillion, The History of Middle Earth, The Children of Hurin, The History of The Hobbit, The Legend of Sigurd and Gurun, and now The Fall of Arthur. It seems that Tolkien's files are gift that keeps on giving
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