To : chairman@herenistarion.org
Subject : Ringbearer's Day / March 19th, 2005

Heya, compadre!

Wow... I'm coming tomorrow, I suddenly recall! And I forgot one vital
question - how do we get in? Just say 'we're on the list!' and shove our
way through? A special entrance? A secret password?

Need I slay a thousand orcs?

We'll be there around 10 AM, I do believe.

c david / ANR

I've known a handful of Tolkien geeks and Rennies, mostly from afar, and this has always been enough for me. I've dated a Rennie who remains in denial, understandably, about being a Rennie, because those people are... questionable, and often naked under odd circumstances. I come this close to the particular brand of people who are given over to this elfy, swordy stuff. I've managed, in my lifetime, to get through one and one half of the Tolkien books, but I found myself reading them as if I would sociology texts for class, scanning for key words and half asleep, and neither technique helps when one character is referred to as Aragorn in one scene, Strider in the next, and then Son of Arathorn, Elessar Telcontar, Wingfoot, Elfstone, Thorongil, Cookiepuss, Fudgie the Whale and Estel respectively in further scenes. One tends to lose track of things, and for a guy who occasionally misplaces his car in empty parking lots, this just doesn't work. I need footnotes, an encyclopedia, a video game tie-in with plenty of robots and maybe a loyal guide to give me the gist of things in terms more akin to Neanderthal grunting.

My qualifications for attending this convention are as follows:
- I have a copy of the Silmarillion, which I understand to be a more detailed history of the ring, pre-Smeagol. I have this book because it was free when I joined a book club many years ago. I even think I opened it once.
- I also have a book of Tolkien's Lost Tales, because, well, it was also free, and I felt that maybe some of the tales that he'd accidentally lost were a smidge more acceptable to my barely literate self.
- I saw the movies, and managed to mostly keep track of them, so, I figured I could at least keep my head above water at any Lord of the Rings event. The feeling that I got from communicating with Anthony, though, was that a majority of the Tolkies (as I lovingly call these Ringfolk), bear only a grudging respect for the Peter Jackson films, and probably even less for the Ralph Bakshi animation, which left my screenplay for the lost scenes where Frodo and Sam make sweet love using stop-motion, action figures and the very suggestive Micro Machines Sarlacc Pit Playset a very distant third.
- I have a pretty complete Lord of the Rings action figure collection, even the rare "Peter Jackson as a Hobbit' figure.
- I once tried to learn Runic, when I was goth, and got as far as reading Brian Snoddy's 'Chaos Lord' Magic : The Gathering card. You know what it said on the ol' Chaos Lord's shield? "I am really mean." I kid you not.
- I killed the dinosaurs.
- I was wearing a Legend of Zelda shirt, which is about as damn elfin as I get. I wore this shirt in defiance of anything that happened before 1986.

So, I went, feeling incredibly spoiled by the breadth of ToyFair, not knowing what to expect. A lecture by a professor, an artist, some music, maybe a few cute elf chicks and some gaming tables that I could wander between. We made it to Marymount College in Manhattan, the location of the event, after a cruel betrayal by both the 4 and 5 trains, which both failed to stop where we needed and sent us eight blocks in the wrong direction respectively.

Ringbearer's Day was a white room filled with rows of folding chairs and populated by either older folks or very young children. We'd arrived 5 minutes after the scheduled 10 AM start time listed on the event postcard, but the diminutive professor, Michael D. C. Drout, was already a fem minutes into his introduction and about to launch into his lecture about Tolkien mythology and the qualities that went into being a good King. There was a handout being passed around, and suddenly, I was in the back of my Freshman Year Modern World class, drawing robots fighting lobsters in my notebook, except this time, I was sitting next to a Gandalf whose sword kept on knocking into things and ankles. Professor Drout, unlike my old Professor French, held my interest raptly, discussing how Eowyn was in fact the most heroic character in the Trilogy, despite Aragorn's tendencies towards leadership on a grander scale and self-sacrifice. Here was the guide to help me understand what the heck was going on in these books! The Professor was interested and interesting, gave a reading from the Trilogy, and left me with a renewed interest in dragging my tired brain through the books again.

We looked at the schedule and Dan noticed that the entire day was to take place in this one room and was to be strictly regimented. There were events lined up until almost 6 PM, which I simply didn't make it to due to a slowly encroaching cold that was severely aggravated by artist Ted Nasmith at around 2 PM, whom I seem to be totally allergic to. There would be no difficult choices between events to make, no painful decisions between painting your own miniature or hearing a cute elf chick play a harp in a different room. This was the room, and this was the schedule, and the miniature painting table had long since been overrun by the smaller children, and dammit, Mr. Nasmith was going to read a very dry section of Lord of the Rings in which Frodo sells his Hobbit hole (which sounds a lot more pornographic than intended), and YOU were going to listen to his impression of Lobelia Brandybuck if it killed you! Dammit!

And man, if you left for the bathroom, that was it. Dan was held outside until Mr. Nasmith was DONE with his reading before he was readmitted. That'll teach ya to pee in a predesignated area!

After Professor Drout did his thing, the Lonely Mountain Forge took the front of the room and spoke about their handmade reproductions of various armoury and weapons as described exhaustively in Tolkien's literature and based on other historical sources from as far away as the internet, which Tolkien was known to have not ever used. Following a relatively short discussion of these items, Joe Piela and the ridiculously serious Jenna Brocious put on some helmets, grabbed some foam weapons and beat the crap out of each other with the skill of true blacksmiths. And let me say... 'brocious' is now my new favorite adjective.

"So, Collin, how was Ringbearer's Day?"
"Oh, man, it was totally brocious! To the max!"

Following that was a presentation of one of many trailers for a film called 'Ancanar', which one could presume from these trailers is an epic film about dramatic things happening about fifteen thousand miles above my comprehension. Some guy has a father, and there's this talisman, and some adorable elf chick to keep you from losing the one damn that you give, and a forest. Everyone else there knew what was going on while I, nerd chieftain, clearly did not. Immediately following the showing, one of the elder ladies in purple directly behind me chimed in, with the grace and elegance of a crow choking on a bit of chunky roadkill that it just couldn't swallow, "The hair looks awful!"

This causes the entirely of the audience to turn around and look in my direction, and bashful creature that I am, I start making disbelieving faces, as if to imply, "I don't know who this lady is, but for 25 bucks, I'll take her out back and we can get back to business." She continues on about how the 'modern hairstyles' ruin a perfectly good film, and how they have been for three years, and I'll be damned if I didn't feel that ol' familiar Rennie-authentic-or-die vibe from her.

Then... then came the children. Five singing and dancing children. And then came a sandwich. These things are documented in the short film at the conclusion of the article. At this point, I was feeling a little beat, as well as feeling a little perverted for taking videos of small children. My fervor for good lo-res digicam video was nothing compared to a man we shall refer to as 'Nantucket Nectars Overzealously Huge Camera Man', who was darting to and fro like some kind of aesthetic ninja and mercilessly shoving himself anywhere that he might fit.

During lunch, we wandered around the Games Workshop booth and observed the excellently painted miniatures, which is something that I have a bit of a flair for and interest in.

Despite my weariness and growing reserves of mucous, Dan and I decided to stick around through Ted Nasmith's talk about illustration, a subject close to my heart. This is when my body shut down almost entirely and didn't recover for the rest of the day. Mr. Nasmith, a fabulous landscape artist and slightly nervous, moderated man, spoke at length about illustration, but not so much the creative aspects of it. For each slide that he presented, Mr. Nasmith simply described the story that was being illustrated. There was a hint here and there at the act of creation and the difficulty in painting starlight appropriately, but the discussion was mostly Tolkien fact after Tolkien fact, when my heart cried out for knowledge of paints and brushes and models and some kind of excitement on Mr. Nasmith's part for the world of art and illustration. He's Canadian, so, I'll forgive him.

The rest of the day remains a mystery to me, as I simply needed to escape and get into bed before I lacked the ability to. I missed the concert from Lingalad and Guiseppe Festa, which was probably the part I was most interested in seeing, but in another two hours, I'd be curled up under the Games Workshop tables, much like the Oliphaunt pictured HERE.

Thanks to Heren Istarion for holding a truly unique event and taking us along for the ride. Now, for the real sweetmeats of the article, CLICK HERE FOR THE ANR MINI-DOCUMENTARY!

[or download it directly here. Click 'n' SAVE!]

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