LIke the other people who reported, I didn't get to see as much as I wanted to. The schedule was really packed. Like the other reporters, I also thought the art room was really amazing, much better than a lot of cons. One of the guests of honor was artist Sylvia Hunnewell. Her Tolkien-related work was very nice.

I had in mind the word about the Elvish consultant for the movie living in the USA (something about faxes, I think), so I kept an eye on Carl Hostetter and Arden Smith, well-known Elvish experts who were both there. I heard them getting all excited about a FedEx package, but I didn't see the package, and if they're involved with the movie, they didn't say anything about it.

They didn't give any talks about Elvish, either. The only person who did was David Salo, who talked (very understandably, I thought, and I don't know anything about Elvish) about how Quenya relates to Finnish and Latin. I missed the first part of his talk because it started too early; it's a shame his wife couldn't have gone first (her talk was okay, but it wasn't about Tolkien).

There was a lot of cool music going on. I heard Mike Foster doing "California Girls" rewritten about Elves in the hall near the registration desk. Pretty funny stuff! There was also a "Bardic Circle" Saturday night that I heard part of: music, poetry, some original work, and a guy playing Australian instruments that sounded just amazing.

Anyway, back to Tolkien. I picked up a cool calendar poster from Houghton Mifflin talking about the Tolkien stuff they're going to publish in the next year or so. There were some other Tolkien talks that I liked, especially one about the Lord of the Rings maps and how some of the weird little places in the middle of nowhere (like Fornost) turn out to be really important to the story. I missed John Rateliff's talk about Beorn because I was at David Salo's talk, but I heard it was really interesting. Too bad Mythcon couldn't do a "Tolkien track" so that those of us who love Tolkien could go to all the talks!

I don't mean to say anything bad about Mythcon, though. It was a lot of fun, and I'm glad I went. Sorry I couldn't pick up any movie tidbits for you!