Slavic nations certainly had some unusual Hobbits, but what of the rest of Europe? Let’s see. This underground comix- inspired Bilbo is tied with this one as the most horrible Hobbit depiction of all time. It’s a J’ai Lu publication, which is par for the course. Is he fighting a troll? An aardvark? Who knows. …
One of the First Age tales in The Silmarillion is how Luthien, an elf, falls in love with Beren, who is human, and aids him in his quest to recover the three Silmaril jewels from Morgoth. This part of The Sil has a more fairy tale flavor than the rest of the book, involving overt …
Today comes one the crueler parts of Tolkien March/April — mocking Smaug! Of The Hobbit fame. He’s been depicted many times over the years, and in my judgement most of the artwork has been appropriate for the story and, in many cases, superlative. But many renditions fall short in depicting the giant reptile’s majesty and …
I thought I was finished with this series, but there’s just too much good material, and a few book covers I overlooked. So let’s proceed. First of all, it occurred to me I never included pictures of non-Russian hobbits to serve as comparisons. So here’s the first ever, drawn by Tolkien. And isn’t it amazing …
Valinor was where the gods, or Valar, of Middle-Earth dwelt; it lay far over the western sea. In the age of The Silmarillion, there were comings and goings to it all the time (by the standards of elves that is) but by the LOTR, it was only a legend to mortals. This illustration by Michael …
As I mentioned in Part 1, Tolkien described orcs in racially stereotyped terms, in fact, he even admitted to it: ” squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.” The above illustration by Tim Kirk, then a fan artist, adheres …
Whenever I do a deep dive on a subject I always discover things I never knew before. Like this ink drawing of Bilbo and Gandalf that children’s book author Maurice Sendak did! The year was 1967 and it was made during a period Sendak was illustrating others’ work but not writing his own. One could …
In coming to the end of this series, I’ll look at editions of The Hobbit that were published in former Eastern Bloc countries. In Part 2 of this series I speculated that the Russian translation may have used for an early Polish edition instead of Tolkien’s original English language one, hence the all-over hairy feet. …