So Jackson's film will find a ready-made audience known for its fanatical devotion and scholarly intensity, one that transcends ordinary demographic boundaries of age, class and nationality. Fans of the "Star Wars" universe waited 16 years for Lucas to answer their prayers with his disappointingly feeble "Phantom Menace." Most Tolkien fans have been waiting their entire lives.

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While Harry Potter fans moan and wail in anticipation of what Hollywood hack Chris Columbus may do to their hero in the movie version, Tolkien enthusiasts are by and large jazzed about Jackson. Of course there is a subset of purists who are already castigating the filmmakers for their heresies: The half-elven princess Arwen Undsmiel, for example, played by Tyler, has reportedly been elevated from a beautiful onlooker to a central character.

But most fans I spoke with seem delighted with the dazzling effects and faux-medieval beauty displayed in Jackson's trailer and can barely contain their excitement. "I have absolutely no doubts," says John Miller, a recycling-plant manager in rural Washington (and "Gamgee" on TheOneRing.net). "It's going to be mind-blowing."

In addition to TheOneRing.net and several other professional-looking sites driven largely by interest in the films -- these include Imladris, Planet Tolkien and Company of the Ring -- there are literally hundreds of Tolkien fan sites on the Net. Some focus on the Oxford don's complex use of myth and language, parsing the elements of Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Norse legends and dialects to be found in Tolkien's Middle Earth.

I found sites in Spanish ("El Seqor de los Anillos"), French, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Polish, Czech and a language I couldn't figure out: Finnish? Estonian?

Others offer homemade art based on the stories or "fanfics" (that is, fan fictions emulating or augmenting the Tolkien tales) that range from surprisingly able imitations to embarrassing "thou art Bumble son of Bomble" dialogue to improbable elven sex scenes. Whoever wrote "The Lay of Galadriel and Gimli" is not only besmirching the reputation of one of Tolkien's most revered characters but also parodying Old English verse forms with admirable dexterity:

... In a pale ship of palm and beech in bitching purple,
did Celeborn cross the Sea
to greet again his gracious wife
Galadriel who gave so freely
to weary walkers worn and tired.
And giving freely to Gimli the Dwarf,
she bounced their bed while berthed below
her husband's boat. "Honey, I'm home,"
he called at once, Celeborn,
while walking through the willowed grounds.
So deep their passions (and so darned loud),
they never heard his nervous tread
on tiled courts until he came
to the chamber's door. How chaste she looked
as Celeborn kissed his babe.

But despite all the online fervor -- which no one in the film world has seen outside of things Lucas -- there are valid reasons industry watchers like Hockensmith remain agnostic about the trilogy's commercial prospects. First of all, while Tolkien's worldwide following is clearly helpful, and the online interest promising, it's also true that hardcore sci-fi geeks of precisely the kind likely to be psyched about these movies are hugely overrepresented on the Net. For the franchise to click on the mass scale New Line is clearly aiming for, millions of mainstream filmgoers who've never heard of Tolkien will have to be convinced that "The Lord of the Rings" is something more than a tedious fairyland fantasy for the Dungeons & Dragons set.

"Look, if every person who's ever looked at Ain't It Cool News goes out and sees the first 'Lord of the Rings' movie twice on opening day, it's still not a hit," says Hockensmith. "It's still a long way from being a hit. I mean, you get that and whatta ya got? Ten million dollars, maybe. Don't get me wrong, the fan base is great for the film. But does it guarantee anything? Absolutely not. I mean, come on, the words 'Star' and 'Wars' mean an awful lot of money when you put them together. When you put the words 'Lord,' 'Rings,' 'the' and 'of' together, do they mean as much?"

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