Stephen Colbert has lined up his next job after finishing up as host of The Late Show in May: writing a new Lord of the Rings film tentatively titled The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past.

Film-maker Peter Jackson, who directed the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Hobbit trilogy, made the surprise announcement in a video on social media on Tuesday. Colbert is an avid, lifelong JRR Tolkien fan and even had a small cameo in Jackson’s 2013 film The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug alongside his wife and children.

Deadline reported the film will be titled The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past and will be written by Colbert, Philippa Boyens and Peter McGee. Set 14 years after the passing of Frodo, the film will follow Sam, Merry, and Pippin as they set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile Sam’s daughter, Elanor, discovers “a long-buried secret that explains why the War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began”.

In a video with Jackson, Colbert said he was inspired to develop a story after rereading The Fellowship of the Ring, and thinking about chapters three to eight, which were not included in Jackson’s film adaptation.

“You know what the books mean to me and what your films mean to me, but the thing I found myself reading over and over again were the six chapters early on in the Fellowship that y’all never developed into the first movie back in the day,” Colbert told Jackson.

“I thought, wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story. Could we make something that was completely faithful to the books while also being completely faithful to the movies?”

Colbert said he then planned an outline for the story with his son, the screenwriter Peter Colbert.

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“It took me a few years to scrape my courage into a pile to give you a call, but about two years ago I did. You liked it enough to talk to me about it … and I could not be happier that [Warner Bros.] loved it,” Colbert told Jackson.

Jackson joked that Colbert would have to find time to adapt the film, in reference to the highly contentious cancellation of CBS’s The Late Show, which Colbert has hosted since 2015. The cancellation was criticised as politically motivated, coming just after Colbert criticised CBS’s parent company, Paramount, for making a $16m settlement with Donald Trump, who has been vocal about his dislike for Colbert.

In response, Colbert said: “It turns out I’m going to be free starting this summer”, to which Jackson replied: “Isn’t that fortunate?”

The film will be produced by Jackson along with the franchise’s longtime producers Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh.

Colbert’s film is the second upcoming film in Tolkien’s universe. Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, which is set to be released 17 December 2027, will be directed by Gollum himself – Andy Serkis – and will follow Aragorn on his quest to capture Gollum during the time period between The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring, in order to keep the ring from Sauron.

The six Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies have grossed a combined US$5.9bn.

Elijah Wood has said that his salary for The Lord of the Rings movies was “not massive” and that appearing in the films was “a real gamble”.

According to a report in Business Insider, which carried quotes from the star at the Texas film awards in March, Wood said the fact that the actors had to sign up for all three films at the start meant that their fees were not related to the film’s financial success. “Because we weren’t making one movie and then renegotiating a contract for the next, it wasn’t the sort of lucrative scenario that you could sort of rest easy for the rest of your life.”

Wood, who played Frodo Baggins in the trilogy of films directed by Peter Jackson and adapted from the epic novels by JRR Tolkien, said the actors understood the significance of the project. “The benefit of that was that we were also signing up for something that was going to be a part of our lives for ever.”

It has been previously suggested that Wood earned about $250,000 (£190,000) for the first film, but the actor told Business Insider that this figure was not accurate and that “it doesn’t matter”.

The size of the fees paid to the cast of The Lord of the Rings compared to stars of other Hollywood movies has often been noted, with Cate Blanchett, who played the elf Galadriel in the series, saying on the Watch What Happens Live talk show in 2024 that she “basically got free sandwiches” and “no one got paid anything”. Orlando Bloom, who played Legolas, said in 2019 that he had been paid $175,000 for all three films, while Sean Astin (Samwise Gamgee) said he got $250,000.

Released between 2001 and 2003, Jackson’s three-film series grossed $2.96bn at the worldwide box office, with a reported budget of $281m.

Lord of the Flies, the story of a group of British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves, is considered to be one of the greatest works of literary history, taught to schoolchildren around the world.

But the novel by Sir William Golding didn’t always begin with the schoolboys crash-landing on the island. Instead, an original version of the manuscript, which was written in a school exercise book with the cover torn off, describes how they had been evacuated out, in the midst of a nuclear war, and their plane shot down in an aerial battle.

The alternative version of the dark societal tale will now go on display to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the book being published.

Golding’s manuscripts, notebooks and letters will also be shown in the exhibition at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, Old Library, University of Exeter later this month.

The original manuscript will not be on public view, due to its fragility, the university said. Golding’s daughter, Judy Carver, said: “The Golding family are grateful to the University of Exeter for their care of the manuscripts and typescripts on loan to the university.

“They also welcome this opportunity for these materials to be viewed by a wider audience. They appreciate the careful work that has brought the exhibition contents to public view.”

Golding, who died in 1993 at his home in Cornwall, was a Nobel prize-winning author. But he had difficulties getting Lord of the Flies taken up by publishers.

It was spotted by a junior editor at publishers Faber and Faber after a string of rejections, and after some changes became an overnight sensation in 1954.

The exhibit will also contain letters to the editor who helped him make Lord of the Flies a success, along with correspondence from Golding on his other novels and works.

Caroline Walter, the interim head of heritage collections at the University of Exeter, said: “This is an exciting opportunity to unite archival material from two distinct collections in Exeter, allowing visitors to delve into the rich literary heritage of the south-west and illuminating Golding’s creative journey.”

Golding went on to write The Inheritors, Pincher Martin and Free Fall along with Rites of Passage, which won him the Booker Prize.

There were film adaptations of his first novel in 1963 and 1990, and a new version is to be shown on TV for the first time by the BBC.

Written by His Dark Materials’ Jack Thorne, the drama is being filmed in Malaysia with a young cast and will remain faithful to the original story of savagery and dark human nature.

The exhibition will be on display from 24 September to 15 December.

Display panels featuring information about Golding’s papers will be on show across Exeter from 2 September to 31 October and there will be free public events in the city this autumn.

It is almost two hundred years since the death of Lord Byron. He succumbed to a fever on April 19, 1824, in the town of Missolonghi, on the west coast of Greece, at the age of thirty-six. As was far from unusual at the time, medical professionals did much to hasten the end that they were supposed to prevent. In Byron’s words, “There are many more die of the lancet than the lance.” Leeches, enemas, and blistering—the deliberate raising of blisters on the skin—were part of the treatment. Byron was reluctant to be bled by his physicians, whom he slighted as “a damned set of butchers,” but eventually surrendered to their efforts. One modern expert has estimated that, in his final days, they drained at least two and a half litres of his blood. It is surprising that the patient lasted as long as he did.

Byron had come to Greece the previous year, sailing from Italy, where he had been living since 1816. He was a British peer, and his poems have lodged him in the canon of English verse, yet the last eight years of his life were spent in exile. His liberal sympathies had always been fierily provocative, and his hope, on arrival in Greece, had been that he might lend his name, his title, his legendary lustre, and his considerable wealth to the cause of Greek independence in the fight against Ottoman rule. A naval officer, Captain Edward Blaquiere, had assured him that “your presence will operate as a Talisman—and the field is too glorious,—too closely associated with all you hold dear, to be any longer abandoned.” Yet here was Byron, expiring not in glory but in delirium, with an unavailing gaggle of doctors and servants, amid a Babel of English, Italian, and Greek, and, outside, the shout of a thunderstorm. “Half smiling,” one onlooker reported, the dying man said, “Questa è una bella scena.” Or, “What a beautiful scene.”

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Illustration by Rose Wong

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That clear note of the theatrical—of the self-dramatizing reflex, ringing out even at the last, on a dismal deathbed, far from home—is what we should listen out for, two centuries on, as we consider the case of Byron. Seldom is the drama unattended by the half smile. However heated the moment, and no matter whether the action is carnal, domestic, military, meteorological, or fashionably social, Byron, at his best, takes care to cast a cool, appraising glance at how the spectacle must appear to the passing ironist:

They look upon each other, and their eyes
Gleam in the moonlight; and her white arm clasps
Round Juan’s head, and his around her lies
  Half buried in the tresses which it grasps;
She sits upon his knee, and drinks his sighs,
  He hers, until they end in broken gasps;
And thus they form a group that’s quite antique,
Half naked, loving, natural, and Greek.

Such is the pretty picture presented by the hero and his paramour (one of many) in the second canto of “Don Juan,” Byron’s uncontested masterpiece. He began it in 1818; the fifteenth and sixteenth cantos were published shortly before his death, a fragment of a seventeenth long afterward. Notice how the quip at the stanza’s end—a comical counterpart, you might say, to the vision of arrested beauty in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—provides something other than cynical deflation. The fact that the lovers conform to a type, in their sighing and gasping, seems to buoy up, not to pop, the erotic mood. For all his lofty status, Byron tends to look askance rather than down. Ever generous, he bequeaths to us his craving for sensation. Just because there is nothing original under the sun doesn’t mean that adventurous souls should not be over the moon. Tomorrow to fresh beds, and battles new.

But where to start? Should you wish to tackle Byron, now is the time, as the bicentenary of his death draws near; there’s no denying, however, that his collected works loom like a fortress in your path. He claimed to detest the act of writing: “I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.” Join the club. Somehow he mastered the torment and plowed ahead. A fine new Oxford edition of his poetry and accompanying material, edited by Jonathan Sachs and Andrew Stauffer, omits great swathes of Byron’s output, but still runs to some eleven hundred pages. (And costs a hundred and forty-five dollars. Could one request a small discount, perhaps, given that there’s a typo on the first page of the introduction?) As for his letters and journals, they have struck devotees as the most unflagging in the language, but these days they need to be hunted down secondhand, and, be warned, they fill thirteen volumes in all. To read straight through them would ruin your sleep, imperil your relationships, and entail trading your life for Byron’s. Sounds like a fair swap to me.

Luckily, there is an alternative. Stauffer is paying double homage, not just co-producing the Oxford edition but also giving us “Byron: A Life in Ten Letters” (Cambridge). This is a compact biography, elegantly structured around a few choice pickings from the poet’s correspondence. Each letter affords Stauffer a chance for a ruminative riff on whichever facet of Byron’s history and character happened to be glittering most brightly at the time. We are presented, for instance, with a jammed and breathless communication from Byron to his London publisher, John Murray, almost three thousand words long, sent from Ravenna, in 1819, and centered on “La Fornarina”—Margarita Cogni, a tempestuous baker’s wife with whom Byron had been involved in Venice. Stauffer comments, “One gets the sense that he could have kept going indefinitely with more juicy details, except he runs out of room.”

The person whom we know as Lord Byron made his entrance into the world, in 1788, with a plainer name: George Gordon Byron. The baby’s mother was Catherine Gordon, a Scottish heiress, and his father was Captain John Byron, commonly referred to as Mad Jack (not to be confused with his father, an admiral known as Foulweather Jack), a spendthrift who did his best to burn through his wife’s inheritance. The child had a misshapen foot and lower leg, which was to cause him lasting pain and lent him what one biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, calls a “sliding gait.” Even here one finds a spasm of unlikely comedy: among his adult acquaintances, there was some disagreement as to which foot was actually deformed.

Young George was three years old when his father died. The boy was taken to Scotland by his mother, who was anything but temperate—“haughty as Lucifer,” as he later recalled. From first to last, there is no sense of placidity, let alone swampy flatness, in Byron’s existence; he was either forcing things to happen or having them befall him, and, in following every twist, you constantly need to remind yourself that this is a real being and not a fictional character. (He may have suffered the same confusion himself.) When he was six, the plot took another turn. The great-nephew of Foulweather Jack was killed by a cannonball in Corsica, the upshot being that Byron was now the heir presumptive to a title. He acceded to it in 1798, becoming the sixth Lord Byron, and his earliest biographer, Thomas Moore, tells us that, at school roll call, the word “Dominus” was prefixed to Byron’s name. According to Moore, the ten-year-old child “stood silent amid the general stare of his school-fellows, and, at last, burst into tears.”

With his change of status came an ancient house, Newstead Abbey, near Nottingham, which still stands today. Grand and gloomy, with monastic ruins built into its structure, and three hundred acres of parkland, it is almost a parody of a Gothic dwelling; Washington Irving, having paid a visit, described it as one of “those quaint and romantic piles, half castle, half convent, which remain as monuments of the olden times of England.” No less absurd is the notion of its having been the fiefdom of a lad. A poem titled “On Leaving N—st—d,” written when Byron was fifteen, shows how the place ignited his flammable imaginings:

Through the cracks in these battlements loud the winds whistle,
For the hall of my fathers is gone to decay.

A Lord of the Rings fanfiction writer has lost a copyright lawsuit over the publication of his own sequel to the much-loved series after opening up a counterproductive legal battle against JRR Tolkien’s estate.

The US-based author Demetrious Polychron published what he described as the “pitch-perfect” Lord of the Rings follow-up in 2022, titled The Fellowship of the King. He planned for the book to be the first of a seven-part series inspired by the franchise.

But the following April, Polychron attempted to sue the Tolkien estate and Amazon over the spin-off TV series The Rings of Power, which he claimed infringed the copyright in his book. A California court dismissed the case after the judge ruled that Polychron’s text was, in fact, infringing on Amazon’s prequel, released in September 2022.

The Tolkien estate then filed a separate lawsuit against Polychron for all physical and digital copies of The Fellowship of the King to be destroyed, as well as a permanent injunction to prevent any of the fanfiction series from being further distributed.

The US court also awarded lawyers’ fees totalling $134,000 (£106,000) to the Tolkien estate and Amazon in connection with Polychron’s lawsuit.

Making the order, Judge Wilson referred to Polychron’s original claim for copyright protection as “unreasonable” and “frivolous” given that his work is entirely based on characters in The Lord of the Rings.

The estate’s UK solicitor, Steven Maier of Maier Blackburn, said: “This is an important success for the Tolkien estate, which will not permit unauthorised authors and publishers to monetise JRR Tolkien’s much-loved works in this way.

“This case involved a serious infringement of The Lord of the Rings copyright, undertaken on a commercial basis, and the estate hopes that the award of a permanent injunction and attorneys’ fees will be sufficient to dissuade others who may have similar intentions.”