Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro's search for writers for The Hobbit and its companion film has ended, with the filmmakers deciding that no one is better suited for the task than they are.

Del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth), who is directing the movies, will team with the Lord of the Rings filmmaker and Hobbit executive producer Jackson to adapt the JRR Tolkien book and write its follow-up.

Also joining them in the writers' room are Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, both of whom collaborated with Jackson on the Rings trilogy.

The news caps an eight-month search for a scribe to adapt the literary classic to the big screen.

Hobbit, written by Tolkien for his children years before the Rings trilogy, follows a young Bilbo Baggins, who finds his comfortable life turned upside down when the wizard Gandalf takes him on a journey for a hoard of treasure that involves trolls, humans, Gollum and his ring of invisibility and a dragon named Smaug.

After Jackson and New Line resolved their differences over profit participation in the Rings films, Jackson said he would not write the scripts for the Hobbit movies because of other commitments.

But in his role as executive producer, he does have approval over creative elements of the productions.

After del Toro came aboard the project, the two began a search for writers. Three factors came into play:

* The filmmakers saw their schedules open up.

* During the general discussions about the films, they realized how much affection they had for the material.

* They also realized that in order to make the targeted release dates, the process required people intimate with Tolkien's world of Middle Earth.

Considering all this, they chose to handle the writing honors themselves, along with Walsh and Boyens.

Hobbit and its sequel are being co-produced, co-financed and co-distributed by New Line and MGM, with New Line managing production and handling domestic distribution through Warner Bros, and MGM distributing internationally.

The films will be shot simultaneously, with principal photography tentatively set for a late-2009 start.

New Line and MGM hope to release Hobbit in 2011 and its sequel the following year.