Sauron is the titular character and primary villain of The Lord of the Rings. He is introduced as The Necromancer in The Hobbit; and his origins and history are recounted in The Silmarillion. But who is Sauron? Why is he so evil? And how did he become so obsessed with locating missing jewelry?

Shanghai, China’s CDC Games will launch a local version of Turbine’s The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar (aka LOTRO) by the end of the year. LOTRO, a massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG) based on Tolkien’s novel, was launched in North America in April 2007 by the developer, Westwood, Massachusetts-based Turbine. As of February of this year, the game had 300,000 subscribers.

So Eru decided to create a mortal race, the Elves, that looks like hairless albino apes. Fine, He likes primates. Then that talent-free dumbass Aulë made the Dwarves, which are just fat stunted Elves. Well sure, Aulë is as creative as the average colon, and produces the same product. No wonder his race is just a bad copy of Eru’s.

What characters from the Lord of the Rings film trilogy could or should appear in the The Hobbit? Let’s run down the list…

A two-part film adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s beloved children’s novel, The Hobbit, is slated for release in December 2011 and December 2012. The films will be directed by Guillermo del Toro, with Peter Jackson acting as executive producer and co-writer.

Britain’s The Times Online reports on Leon Howe, a ten-year-old boy working to save the hotel where JRR Tolkien wrote part of The Lord of the Rings. The now-shuttered Three Cups Hotel in Lyme Regis, Dorset, has been targeted by developers who want to convert it into apartments.

If you’re (a) a Tolkien fan and (b) and role-playing game player, then you will also find this amusing.

MerpCon (Middle-earth Role Playing Convention) is an annual international event dedicated to Tolkien enthusiasts, scholars, fans, and role-playing gamers. Gaming events are set anywhere in Tolkien’s expansive universe. Guest speakers are noted (and often published) Tolkien scholars.

In order to give meaningful background information for characters like Gandalf, Sauron, Galadriel and Elrond, I will have to refer to cosmological and cosmogenic ideas laid out in The Silmarillion, which tells the early history of Tolkien’s world.

A suit filed against New Line Cinema, producers of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy, by the heirs of author JRR Tolkien will be decided by a jury, a state court judge has ruled.