Lord of the Rings Movie night snacks

Hi! Future Ticia 2024 here, I’m updating and republishing this 2015 post. The Lord of the Rings was our very first movie marathon for New Year’s Eve, and we repeated it again as our last official one before Batman headed off to the army. Our Lord of the Rings snacks and Lord of the Rings feast were never part of an official Lord of the Rings book club, because the kids listened to this as a read aloud years before they could get anything beyond enjoying the story from it. So, let’s travel back in time to one of our first book and a movie nights.

I now return you to 2015 Ticia, I will pop in as I update this post with some more information and ideas for those of you who want to actually officially study this book with your kids.

Oh, and there are affiliate links in here.

Back to the original Lord of the Rings movie night snacks post

As I was signing up for a birthday post this month I KNEW I wanted to write on Tolkien.  After all, we were going to watch the last Hobbit movie this Christmas, I watched all of the Lord of the Rings movies in the theaters on opening day.  I’ve read the books, and then I started thinking about what I would write.  And I got stuck.

Then I wrote an entire post that I’ve now deleted and rethought because TODAY we are having a Middle Earth Feast.  One of our local movie theaters is showing a Middle Earth Movie Marathon.  They’re starting at 7:00 am and including a 9-course meal as they watch all 6 movies.  It’s going to be over 20 hours long.

Let’s talk making this into a Unit Study

Okay, if you are trying to do something with this.

Huh, somehow 7Sisters does not have a Lord of the Rings book club. They have a Hobbit literature guide, but not Lord of the Rings. Silently adds this to her list of book clubs to create.

Okay, so let me do a quick search for some book clubs elsewhere.

• From LitLovers
• Course Hero
• Tea with Tolkien

Future Ticia 2024’s brain is getting fuzzy with the weather change coming through tonight, so I’m going to finish getting this a bit more updated, and I’ll add some more if I can find any that I really like, because those three are not great suggestions.

• Lord of the Rings trilogy– because having a pretty paper copy is always good. I think we own two different paper copies in addition to the ebook and audiobook versions.
• Lord of the Rings extended edition– yes, we do watch the extended edition, are you a heathen that you don’t watch that?

Now back to past Ticia with all of the crazy, though I have added in more commentary….

We are going to copy this tomorrow, and I’ll update this with better pictures once we’ve completed the entire thing, but for now, here’s our menu (we’ve imitated a Hobbit’s meal plan for this):

Middle Earth Feast

• Breakfast: pancakes, and we’ve got some special butters and syrups to try with it
• Second breakfast: fruit and cheese because Aragorn threw an apple at the Hobbits when they suggested a second breakfast
• Elevensies: scrambled eggs, because Superman wanted to do eggs.
• Lunch: make your own salad, similar to our make-your-own pasta bar and make-your-own gyro bar.
• Tea: cheese, crackers, sliced meats, and lots of tea
• Dinner: Chinese pork ribs and fried rice (and I apparently have not posted this delicious recipe, I must fix this), when we redid this we instead did beef stew, because that’s a common travel food while on the road and fresh bread
• Supper: sandwiches (I figure this will be close to midnight and we’ll want a snack, but something simple)

Future Ticia says, in both times we did this the planned meals were wildly popular.

And as you can see there is a lot of food going on, so we took walks between each movie to expend some energy.

Lord of the Rings snacks

Because, why just have meals, when you can also have an entire counter full of snacks?

Okay, that is still not all of the snacks. It’s kind of crazy just how many snacks we had for this.

• fireworks- sour candy
• Hobbit doors- yogurt-covered pretzels (I have to admit, this is more because the movie has such iconic doors), I’ll also add since we’re doing this at Christmas, ours are snowflake-shaped, which makes them closer to the round door shapes. I’ve seen pictures where people take cookies and frost them to look more like doors, I’m lazy.
• Gandalf’s pipe- pirouette cookies
• strawberry tarts- some kind of strawberry candy, but you could easily do the Pepperidge Farms strawberry cookies, I’m trying to remember why we did this, and I cannot remember offhand
• Lembas bread- Maple leaf cookies
• One ring- gummy rings
• treents- Nutty Buddys, they sort of like tree trunks, sort of, kind of
• Flames of Mount Doom- cheetos
• Ale- Sprite
• Elven wine- cranberry juice
• beer- root beer

Okay, and that’s our snacks. I feel like there were more, but at the same time that is a lot of food. Tolkien loved to describe food, so you can add in food all the time.

More great 8th grade learning

Officially according to reading level, the Lord of the Rings trilogy is 8th grade. So, here are a few things we did when the kids were in 8th grade.

• American Elections Unit
• How to Make a Writer’s Notebook
• 8th-grade books made into movies
• Egyptian mythology lesson
• Greece Unit

Lord of the Rings image from Dirk Forster

By the way, check out his pictures, they’re amazing.

Originally published January 1, 2015