After all the different hobbits on the covers of Russian and Slavic translations, surely there must have been more types in Middle-earth than just the ones in The Shire? After all, it’s a big place with plenty of room. In his other notes, Tolkien stated that Hobbits came into The Shire in the middle of …
The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien HarperCollins, 2001 (Originally published 1977) Though a longtime fantasy and Tolkien fan I held off on reading The Silmarillion for many years. It seemed too dry, too complicated. But after I’d tackled the more recently published The Fall of Númenor I wanted more of …
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 …
The Tolkien revival has grown up with the internet. When the Jackson trilogy began in 2001, memes, forums, message boards, and myspace were new and fresh, enabling fans to find each other and begin to create… humor, that is. The following is a sampling from those 25 years. You’d need to be born before 1980 …
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. …
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