You have to check this out!
Lego Press Release

Just saw this on FB! /hyperventilates

I think my heart just fluttered!

Cool! My kids aren't into most of the things Lego sells (apart from Ninjago), but they have read The Hobbit.

Same thing I posted at Classic-Castle. Enjoy.

Hey, parts are parts. Looks like I'll have to try out the trick with the yellow sharpie on the fleshies after all. Not looking forward to prices being higher because of it being a licensed theme, but we have BrickLink. While there is hope there will be some cool stuff to come out of the line, I'm not to worried. After it's run we will get more Castle. Good luck topping this

I haven't quite decided how I feel about this announcment. I'm not a huge LotR/Hobbit fan but there are bound to be some rather interesting building and minifig parts to come out of this. Good news for Lego financially and the FOL community as a whole though.

This is where all of my money will go as soon as I buy a goalie mask... I must have Aragorn and Gandalf and Legolas and A BALROG OF MORGOTH. And Smeagol, and Frodo, and Sam, and a Treant, while I'm at it.

What did you say?

This announcement (actually I saw the Eurobricks announcement earlier) just made my freaking YEAR! When my brother and I really got into LEGO, two of the things we made and wished that LEGO made were Star Wars and Lord of the Rings... heck, General Gandalf has been part of our LEGO universe (and mine since my brother left LEGO behind for good) since at least 1989 (my custom Gandalf fig was one of the few to survive my first dark age, the other two being my sig fig and Captain Red Beard), and we used the forestmen as Wood Elves, even going so far as building a reasonable facsimile of Caras Galadon (the eleven tree city in Lothlorien) on a green 32x32 base plate, and had at least one White Tree to go with it!

I'm so excited that I'll be able to give ol' Gandalf (as well as Master Sergent Gimli, Corporal Ugluk, senator Galadriel, etc) a proper OFFICIAL makeover.

...Of course, when this was still just rumor and speculation, I told my LoTR-loving girlfriend about it, and she said that if it was true, then I had to get her one each of all the hobbits (bilbo, frodo, sam, merry and pippin) as well as Gandalf.

I'm excited about the orcs and dwarves, though: I was JUST coming out of my second dark age when the Fantasy Era castle sets were being discontinued (I managed to get a King's Battle Chariot set that had two Orcs, though), so I missed most of the Orc and Dwarf sets... This will allow me to rectify that (although I'm going to be getting multiples of the series 6 Statue of Liberty for making female orcs).

EDIT: I might just have to get some of the FIFA world cup minifigs off Brick Link just so I can re-create scenes from this video in LEGO.

This will have some awesome pieces for sure!!

This will be fun!