Various facts you may or may not know.

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  • During filming LOTR, Viggo Mortensen had a tooth knocked out in a sword fight and asked to have it glued back on so he could finish the scene that day!

  • To create Hobbiton, 5000 cubic metres of vegetable and flower gardens were planted before filming to make it look like it had aged over time.

  • Altogether there were 274 days of shooting.

  • Sean Astin had to gain 30 pounds to play the role of Sam.

  • On the set of the two towers, Orlando Bloom broke a rib falling from a horse when John Rhys-Davies stunt double landed on top of him.

  • Peter Jackson plays an extra in all three movies.

  • It's the first ever trilogy to be shot at once.

  • The first scene to be filmed was on October 11th, and was the black rider scene when the hobbits are hiding from a ringwraith.

  • Orlando Bloom originally tried out for the part of Faramir.

  • Frodo on average falls down every 10 minutes in FOTR.

  • The film was originally going to end with a voice-over epilogue by Cate Blanchett's character, Galadriel, detailing the fate of the fellowship of the ring after the events of the movie.

  • The opening scene which tells the origin of Gollum was originally shot for The Two Towers, to be shown after Gollum remembers his real name (Smeagol) for the first time.

  • Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, changed its name 'Middle Earth' for the day of the premiere of FOTR.

  • Sean Astin directed his own short film, 'The Long and Short Of It', whilst LOTR was being made. Most of the cast and crew helped out in making it, and Peter Jackson even made a cameo appearance as the bus driver.

  • LOTR's producer/writer, Fran Walsh, is the wife of Peter Jackson.

  • To create the sound of the orc's chanting during the Battle of Helm's Deep, Peter Jackson went to a cricket stadium in New Zealand and got the 30,000 people in the crowd to chant in the 'black speech'.

  • In FOTR, when filming the scene in which Arwen conjures the flood to kill the Nazgul, there was a genuine flash flood at the filming site, carrying off part of the set.

  • The movie marks the second time in history that the third movie in a trilogy was nominated for Best Picture, by the Academy Awards and Golden Globes, after Godfather: Part III, The (1990) and the only time that a third movie has won the Best Picture Oscar.

  • To create realistic galloping horses for the largely CGI horseback army, they took some footage of a horse in a motion-capture suit.

  • The character of Irolas was originally written to be Beregond, a character who appears in the book. Irolas does not appear in the book, but he is identified as being Beregond's brother.