Welcome to the mailbag, where we answer fanmail that you send in, over the course of the week.  For those that don’t know, we’ll take your questions, and if we don’t know the answers, we’ll try to get the answers from people that would know.  We might even make something up!  I have a very broad sense of humor, on top of a vast knowledge of film, music and comics with a wide range in taste and a great memory that serves to bring great comparisons or answers to your questions.

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In the last few years, we’ve had a lot of lost manuscripts begin to surface from the likes of C.S. Lewis’ friend J.R.R. Tolkien.  From The Children of Hurin to The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, the wealth of literature from Tolkien has been expanded greatly, and it’s about time that something new from Lewis has been discovered.  Communications Professor Steven Beebe of Texas State discovered a lost manuscript fragment in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.

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This week’s mailbag features a topic that is very interesting to me: that of the relationship of J.R.R. Tolkien and his writing to C.S. Lewis and his.  Other topics include what Anna Popplewell and William Moseley are up to next, and Andrew Adamson’s past in Papua New Guinea.  I’ll see if I have the time to reach back into the mailbag archives after the five letters that I received this week.  Be sure to look through the comments from last week’s mailbag for some fascinating follow-up information as well!  Let’s get started!

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In recent years, there have been two different fantasy series that share similarities. They have the same basic plots, the same basic creatures, and so on. Looking at the posters, cases, and trailers, you would think they were very alike, but when you look deeper, you see that they are very different indeed. This fact shows itself through the success of the books and films of their names. (more…)

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As many of you know, Tolkien and Lewis were great friends for many years.  They were influential on each other’s works and both taught at Oxford.

The place to go for news on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, for the last 10 years has been none other than TheOneRing.net!  We’d like to congratulate them on 10 great years, and look forward to the next 10 years as well!  I’ve been a big fan of the website for many years, and they’ve provided inspiration for me with this site as well.  This is not to mention the fact that they have allowed me to use their movie review engine for the Narnia Fan Reviews!

With The Hobbit films coming out in a few years, there’s a lot to look forward to!  And we wouldn’t have it any other way!

For those interested, Weta created a birthday video and a card, that you can see at WetaNZ.com!  It’s a well deserved, and well earned reward for a job well done!

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Another successful April Fools Day comes and goes.  I couldn’t have asked for a better response than the one that was given by the amount of press that we received from our three major April Fools Day jokes this year.

For our wrap up this year, Jonathon and I are collaborating on this story. We’re both weighing in on the response to the stories that I can take no credit for.  Jonathon is a genius, and he is THE genius behind the April Fool’s Day jokes this year and last.

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Two of the biggest Christian actors are slated to star in a film about two of the 20th century’s most prominent Christian writers. Actors Kirk Cameron (Growing Pains, Left Behind, and Fireproof), and Mel Gibson (Lethal Weapon, Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ) are slated to star as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien in an upcoming still untitled movie.

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It is of common knowledge that both Lewis and Tolkien took part in the First World War, and that in the years following the conflict they became distinguished scholars of the English language and literature at Oxford University. Those who accuse these writers of escapism tend to overlook the fact that such a curriculum vitae would make it virtually impossible for them to remain ignorant of, and not to at least in some way reflect in their own writing, the events that changed the world and the literature in the first half of the twentieth century. This paper aims to offer a new approach to the place of The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings in this common context, and also to discuss how these works differ from each other with reference to the way in which they combine Christian and pagan elements.

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Amazon.com has today announced the release of their new edition of Kindle. With that announcement comes new additions to the library of books available for Kindle, including many works written by C.S. Lewis.

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The C.S. Lewis and Inklings Society is now accepting registrations for its twelfth annual meeting on March 26-28, 2009, addressing the theme “Inklings: Dinosaurs or Contemporaries?” and featuring plenary speaker Peter Schakel. See below for more details. Please click here to see the seminar schedule (as a PDF). A detailed schedule will be available mid-February.

In papers and plenary sessions, the conference will explore ways in which C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams may (or may not) be particularly relevant to the literary, theological, philosophical and socio-political issues of our own early 21st century times. As in previous conferences, we would like to extend the conversation to include Dorothy Sayers as well, and we would like to open the conversation even a bit further this year by including G.K. Chesterton, a strong-minded proto-Inkling of sorts, in the mix. What might this diverse and pleasantly provocative circle of thinkers have to offer to the world of ideas that we find ourselves in?

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