And where will they live? That's what I often wonder.

At risk of turning my blog into my own personal extended edition, I'm going to finish my thoughts on watching LOTR start to finish (twice!):

In the intervals of gorging myself on these brilliant movies, I watched a lot of the extras; in particular the cast commentaries. Now I've never really been a fan of watching commentary instead of just watching the movie (although I understand that the commentary on The West Wing DVDs is worth a listen), but I gave it a try and was so glad I did. It's fun to listen what is essentially this group of actors getting together to reminisce about the making of these films. In particular I enjoy listening to Billy Boyd, which should come as a surprise to no one since he is from Glasgow! He and Dominic Monaghan had me laughing throughout every scene. Also bringing me delight was the others "translating" what Billy Boyd said for the benefit of audience members who do not speak Glaswegian-- and I admit I was quite chuffed with myself that I required no translation. Anyway, I'm not going to repeat all the funny moments here, but I will say that if you are a fan, the commentaries are well worth the time it takes to watch. (And I also admit that I skipped quite a bit.)

As someone whose future degree lies (I hope) in linguistics, I also marvelled during the extras at how many accents Peter Jackson managed to assemble for the films, with actors from just about every commonwealth country (or so it seemed), plus a few more places thrown in for good measure. I would give quite a lot just to have been there and listen to all these different accents. And in addition to those of course is the linguistic treasure Tolkien himself created, with a different languages for several of the cultures he created-- some of which managed to get into the film, notable the Elvish. And some Dwarfish (?-- not sure that's what it's called, and I'm not looking it up at this moment). I lack the creativity to make up a language myself, I'm afraid, but I do have a love for languages on this earth. And once I get a reasonable handle on all the languages I want to learn, maybe I'll become fluent in Elvish. :)