My first encounter with Tolkien was reading The Hobbit at age 11 or 12. I found it lying around my sister’s house while on a trip there. It was the paperback edition to the left, which was published by Ballantine in the mid-1970s. That’s Tolkien’s own artwork on the cover. For years I thought it was just a generic scene, then I looked more closely and noticed the barrels in the stream and a tiny Hobbit clinging to one of them, as per the escape from the Elf-King chapter in the book.
This was the same book I’d seen previously in the book/greeting card store where I bought my SF paperbacks with my allowance money. I was a Ray Bradbury fan and bought up all I could find. But something about The Hobbit and LOTR paperbacks, with their odd artistic style (sorry, Tolkien) was off-putting. They seemed too grown-up for 11-year-old me. I actually felt the same way about the Earthsea paperbacks released around the same time. Even though they were meant for teens in my age group, those covers were weird. If the artists were Darrel Sweet or Tim Hildebrandt, for example, a style more realistic and less drug-induced, I likely would have bought them.
My second encounter with Tolkien was through a calendar that hung in my older cousin’s room, the Tim Kirk one also published by Ballantine. I would leaf through it when I had sleepovers there. By then I knew who Bilbo, Gollum, Smaug, and Gandalf were, but not anyone else, which was mighty puzzling to me. My cousin generously gifted it to me at the end of the year and I cut out the pictures I liked and framed them.
Back to The Hobbit. When I came to the “Riddles in the Dark” chapter, I was sooooo sure I had read it somewhere before. But where?
This is where. Not my copy, but my mother used to buy this magazine for me from the local five-and-dime. Note how it was ahead of the rush for all things Tolkien that happened in the mid-1970s.
Also note the artist’s style. Don’t the characters look an awful lot like those that showed up in the 1977 Rankin-Bass animated special?
Character reference sheet for the Rankin-Bass production
The truth is this and it’s stranger than fiction. Arthur Rankin Jr., one of the two heads of Rankin-Bass, saw the illustrations in this very magazine and contacted the artist, Lester Abrams, and contracted him to do the character design for the film. The actual animation, however, was done in Japan, by Topcraft Co., a group of animators who had split from Toei Animation. WhenTopcraft went bankrupt in the 1980s it was bought out by a group of artists that included Hiyao Miyazaki… and became Studio Ghibli!
Above are Bilbo and Gollum as they appeared in the actual animation. I sense the Ghibli aesthetic in the sensitive character of Bilbo’s face while Gollum is more fishlike or froglike than he was in the original illustration. He was also physically larger than Gollum, though not as large as he appears in the second pic as Bilbo is in the background. When this Gollum hints he might eat Bilbo, he means it! He’s a more terrifying character here than in the movies, where’s he more pathetic and crazed. If the Jackson team had gone in this direction instead of Andy Serkis’ humanoid Gollum it would have worked.
Another mystery solved!
