One of the awesome things about J. R. R. Tolkien as an author is how he managed to disobey pretty much every principle of Writing 101 and still come away with some of the most widely loved books ever written in the English language. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings don't follow the rules for "good writing" in the least; they're paced all wrong, way too slow, with too much description and too many characters. They are heavy, heavy books, chock-full of detail and excess that would make any writer trained for efficiency cringe. 

But it's exactly that kind of excess that transforms Middle Earth from a philologist's daydream into a fully realized world. Tolkien set the precedent for how to create alternate universes by constructing a living, breathing reality out of his own head. There's never been another world more realized by a single person. Most mythologies emerge from the collective imagination, but Tolkien built his all by himself. As such, reading his work is less like churning through a novel and more like shutting off your usual reality in exchange for another. You accept the pacing, the density, the on-paper faults because they all help to immerse you in the world. 

That's part of what makes Tolkien film adaptation so difficult. How, exactly, do you translate something so mammoth into a medium that emphasizes plot and action? A medium whose stories must fit into two-hour blocks? Peter Jackson did a pretty darn good job balancing action and detail in his LotR. Unlike prior attempts at filming the Rings, Jackson made the story very much his own, making sacrifices to the source material where necessary in order to make a good film. Because Jackson knows it's more important to make a good film than a faithful adaptation of its source, plenty of Tolkien's world went untranslated.

For the next Tolkien film, The Hobbit, Jackson has opted not to cut down on the perhaps excessive number of the story's primary players. We've still got all 13 dwarves, with Bilbo as lucky number 14. All the dwarf parts have been cast and now we've got promo shots of five of them in costume. It's not an easy job for a costume designer to distinguish between 13 similar dwarves, but these guys seem pretty distinct so far, with unique flourishes and accessories to their costumes. Hopefully the actors have been given enough to work with in the script and direction that they can distinguish themselves and keep their characters interesting, too. Check out the shot of Nori, Ori, and Dori below (that's Oin and Gloin up in the header image).