Tove Jansson, author of the Moomins, also illustrated "The Hobbit" in the 1960s.
Her version turned out controversial because Gollum is a giant compared to Bilbo. Turns out Tolkien hadn't described Gollum's size anywhere, and the author actually reworded future editions of the book to make it clear that Gollum is a small creature.
In my opinion Jansson's "Hobbit" is a great interpretation by a legendary artist, and this Gollum controversy has overshadowed it too much.
The Soviet 1970s version (the OP link here) has an obvious debt to Jansson's illustrations, but the style is much more conventional and stiff. Jansson's linework and compositions are exquisite.
Fascinating - Jansson's artwork is lovely. Thank you for sharing it!
I think the huge Gollum is a very understandable misinterpretation, but I think it's likely false the text she worked from was ambiguous about Gollum's size.
If she was working from the 1951 revision, which seems likely if she was working in the 60s, then there is an explicit cue in the text showing that Gollum must be roughly Bilbo's size, when Bilbo is escaping the caves:
> Straight over Gollum’s head he jumped, seven feet forward and three in the air...
If Bilbo could jump over Gollum with a three-foot leap, Gollum cannot be a giant.
That said, it's well after the passage she illustrated, and would require a pretty attentive reader to catch, so as I said, the mistake is certainly understandable.
Additional caveat that I've not read the second edition of The Hobbit, only more recent ones, so it's conceivable that passage wasn't _exactly_ as I've quoted it.
I strongly suspect was largely as written, however, and even without the explicit numbers, if Bilbo jumps over Gollum, the inference remains largely the same.
> If Bilbo could jump over Gollum with a three-foot leap, Gollum cannot be a giant.
Agree (although Gollum was crouched down)
> I strongly suspect was largely as written, however, and even without the explicit numbers, if Bilbo jumps over Gollum, the inference remains largely the same
I'm guessing that the jump wasn't in the first edition at all, where Bilbo and Gollum apparently parted amicably.
> Its on such an expedition that the ring "slips" from him, further suggesting the ring is actually not only his size, but a little large.
It's heavily implied in LOTR that the ring is able to change it's size to cause itself to slip from a person's finger, though that's somewhat out of scope and the illustrator may not have read that.
>Her version turned out controversial because Gollum is a giant compared to Bilbo. Turns out Tolkien hadn't described Gollum's size anywhere
Cain and Abel, whom Deagol and Smeagol (Gollum) parallel, may have been giant themselves, given that Adam (their father) is specified in certain religious /apocryphal texts as being 60-100 cubits tall, or 90-150 feet.
that's a wild theory, considering that Tolkien himself described Gollum to be "a small, slimy creature" after the revisions, probably because of Jansson's depiction of him. and although the parallel is clear between many characters of the Hobbit and the Bible, do you have any credible sources that Tolkien took inspiration from apocryphal texts (or in this case the Hadith) ?
Not in this specific case. There are other examples that could be brought up, such as the Gift of Men (death), which may draw on the Book of Jubilees which suggests that death was given to man to limit wickedness and allow for renewal. Or Book of Enoch and the fall of Numenor. "Credible sources" will be difficult to procure as Tolkien notably avoided citing specific influences when discussing his works
> the author actually reworded future editions of the book to make it clear that Gollum is a small creature
The primary retconning occurred in 1951, when the encounter in The Hobbit between Bilbo and Gollum was rewritten to be confrontational rather than amicable, because TLOTR now needed the Ring to have a malevolent influence. The retconning is reflected in Bilbo's apology in the Council of Elrond to those (i.e. Gloin, but implicitly the readers) who may have heard a different version of his story. I'd love to see a first edition of the Hobbit to see what Tolkien actually did say about Gollum.
[Edit]. Just checked my (third edition) copy of The Hobbit. It only says that Gollum was "a small slimy creature" who "had a little boat". There aren't any other descriptions of their relative size, except that Bilbo actually jumps over Gollum's head when escaping him (Gollum is crouched down at this point), as a sibling comment has just observed.
I can see why one would think Gollum was huge early on. Without the context of the Lord of the Rings (where it’s established he was something like a hobbit before becoming Gollum), and also the fact that he ate goblins who wandered in his area of the caves, one might easily guess he was huge.
Most books are, sadly, quite worthless nowadays (monetary value). But the Tove Jansson illustrated, swedish edition of Bilbo is still a sought-after book that usually goes for hundreds of dollars.
Here is an ongoing auction on Tradera (the swedish ebay), currently at SEK 3050 (~$320):
I am not sure I understand. Aren't books "worthless" because they are readily available? Books are only expensive if they are rare (out of print, special limited edition, hand made or labor intensive, author signed, etc.). I don't think I would want "most" books to be rare and difficult to obtain.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to sell, or even give away, books. In Stockholm, Sweden, where I am most familiar with the situation, most charity second-hand stores no longer accept hardcover books at all. The monetary value of most second-hand books is so low that many end up being thrown away instead of recirculated.
Of course, there are rare antiquarian books that always find a buyer, but they are quite few. And perhaps nobody will mourn the vast number of cheap crime novels thrown away every day, but there is so much more: good, beautiful, high-quality books that happen to be out of fashion for the moment. These, too, are being thrown away.
It was a long time since public libraries aimed to maintain a somewhat curated (or complete-ish) collection. Nowadays it is all about statistics. If books are not borrowed often enough, they are removed from the shelves and disappear.
Perhaps I am overly pessimistic, but I fear that many, many books will, for all intents and purposes, be lost. There are so many books that aren't scanned/digitized.
There are plenty of books which are scarce but not sought after. Not necessarily because they lack intrinsic value but simply because they are forgotten. Beautifully crafted antique books which can be bought for almost nothing nowadays since the collector’s value isn’t there.
Not my experience - the Victorian books I bought cheap as a teenager I wouldn't even attempt to replace these days. Maybe the books I'm interested in held their value for some reason. (Just picked one at random, the exact binding I have isn't in abe, but the two closest, less decorative examples are 135GBP and 195GBP).
If you find someone who has cataloged and listed what they have, especially of “pre-ISBN” books you’re going to have a certain price floor. And if you want a book, likely others do, too.
But you also can find them and garage and thrift stores, languishing unsold.
Which perhaps people buying books because how they look on the shelf is bad, but is it worse than the giant recycling grinder machine turning them into pulp to fuel Amazon’s Mordor-esque delivery furnaces?
This is only partly true. The fact that the OP is referring to is the fact that books aren't sought after. Many books that have been bought for a 100 dollars in 1980 are worth only a few dollars nowadays even if they are relevant. Not many people look for used books.
I always thought that the passages that talk about Smeagol before he was corrupted by the ring - made it rather easy to think of him as a hobbit or maybe a human.
As bonus trivia, depiction of Bilbo was based on the "short, round stature, expressive eyes, broad and open face" of the famous Soviet actor Yevgeniy Leonov (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Leonov).
Basically, he says that he was approached by some random person and was gifted a copy of The Hobbit. This person turned out to be an illustrator of translated edition (same as at the OP's link) and he made Bilbo look like Leonov (the guy in the video).
As a footnote, Leonov famously voiced Soviet version of Winnie The Pooh in all its glorious 3 episodes:
I'm assuming you're not saying Tolkien based his description of Bilbo on that Leonov. Are you saying the illustrator based the illustrations on Leonov?
Does Leonov actually say that? Or just that the description and illustrations are similar to him?
In the video, Leonov says Belomlinskij (artist who made illustrations for this edition) himself gifted him this book and explained that he based Bilbo looks on Leonov.
My sister read me the first chapter of this edition of The Hobbit and refused to read me any more. So I had to read the rest myself to find out what happens. It became the first "grown up" book I ever finished.
When I read LoTR a few years later, these illustrations formed the images of what hobbits, dwarfs, and Gollum looked like in my minds' eye. Decades later, having seen the Peter Jackson films several times, Bilbo still looks wrong to me as I expect Leonov; Gollum looks wrong too for that matter.
“Down the face of a precipice, sheer and almost smooth it seemed in the pale moonlight, a small black shape was moving with its thin limbs splayed out. […] The black crawling shape was now three-quarters of the way down, and perhaps fifty feet or less above the cliff's foot.[…] They peered down at the dark pool. A little black head appeared at the far end of the basin, just out of the deep shadow of the rocks.”
No visual version of Tolkien’s works could ever be made now which depicts Gollum accurately.
I grant you that it’s not clear-cut, but nowhere in the book (that I can find) is Gollum described as being pale, or even lightly colored (except his eyes). Instead, Gollum is frequently, as I showed, described as being “black” in color. He is also being misidentified as an Orc, which are similarily described.
Similar experience for me, except my imagery was influenced by the Brothers Hildebrandt. I collected all their cards and was obsessed with the detail in them.
Another illustrator from the 70's was Ingahild Grathmer[1] which was said to be a favourite by Tolkien himself[2]. Maybe he was polite because of the noteriaty (not sure if known at the time) but I do like them as well. Have a look at the documentary on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/rNqVqzIxi3A&t=24m19s
Tolkien was generally favorable to any illustrations that followed the text; he actually explicitly mentioned that he was creating a “legendarium” which would have different interpretations.
What he didn’t like was illustrations by those who never even read the descriptions, or created things based on other media (Tolkien dwarves vs Snow White dwarfs, for example).
It's still on my to-be-read list, but anyone exploring the Russian/Tolkien rabbit hole might also like The Last Ringbearer, which is a retelling from the other side's perspective. The English translation was never officially published but is on archive.org and probably other less reputable sites.
Worth noting: the author, Kirill Yeskov, authored a great book on the Earth history and the old theories of it. And the reasons he wrote The Last Ringbearer, according to his (now deleted) blog, were 1) the geology of Tolkien's world was impossible, the landmass had to be bigger, 2) if the orcs were an army, there must have been a country, a money system, a bureacracy, a developed economy, and so on. From that country's perspective, the elves were a small bunch of rioters on the fringe of the empire.
In Bulgaria, our longest running comic magazine (Дъга ("Duga") e.g. Rainbow) had version of the Hobbit - https://www.endorion.org/books/comics/ - This was in fact the first version of the "books" I got exposed in, and then much later read the real stuff :)
The funny thing is the local communist newspaper "Red Truth" (as if there were non-communist ones, ...) published a review of LOTR in 1977, in which they pretty much took the side of the Mordor. (It might be a made-up joke from the 90s, but the spirit of absurdity is spot on for 1977.)
The reasoning was roughly:
* Mordor is obviously meant to be USSR, as it's in the east.
* The orcs are clearly heavy industry workers, building the world of future.
* Bilbo is obviously a son from a bourgeoisie family, disgusted by hard work.
* The west is represented by elves = aristocracy, people = bourgeoisie, hobbits = landowners.
* The group of reactionaries are afraid of a made up "threat from the east", led by Gandalf.
* Gandalf = a reactionary ideologue, keeping people in state of fear of progress and knowledge.
* Saruman = protector of the oppressed, declared a traitor and destroyed by the reactionaries.
* But socialism can't be destroyed by throwing something in the fire. All the power to Mordor, surrounded by reactionary neighbors.
And these days many Russian ultra-patriots are proudly accepting the representation of Russia as Mordor and its soldiers as orcs in the war in Ukraine.
The outlined reasons are cartoonishly communist, but "The Last Ringbearer"'s worldview is not communist. It is more like "the West are liars". And yes, this does resonate in Russia.
Well, they are not entirely wrong: Tolkien was a big fan of "old England", as he saw it, with its primarily agricultural focus, and held rather dim view on industrialization and modernism. While Soviets of course were fanatics of industrialization and considered the petty bourgeoisie and kulaks (and Bagginses certainly look a lot like kulaks) their mortal enemies. Tolkien was very adamant that he does not do allegories, and yet the Soviets were right to consider him ideologically opposed to them. He was also a devout Catholic and ardent anti-Communist, so whether or not the Red Truth really declared him an enemy, they certainly would have strong reasons to.
This is unlikely, because "The lord of the rings" was translated much later. "The Hobbit" was first published in 1976, there was an announcement that there is more, but the first volume of "The Lord of the Rings" was published only in 1983.
I found an article in English [1] that mentions a newspaper article called "Tolkien's Cosmos" that does indeed find political meaning in "The Lord". But that article was written much later, in 1997. I cannot find the article itself, but judging from the time and the newspaper ("The Independent Newspaper", proudly liberal) I would guess the author was not a proponent of communism, but the opposite: he equated Mordor or Saruman with Soviet Union because he considered himself to be the part of the winning forces of the West.
I enjoy all illustrations of LOTR & The Silmarillion from BEFORE the Jackson trilogy. I love the film adaptation but one could say that it's been _too_ influential in shaping the portrayal of Tolkien's characters and world.
Especially to people born after the movies came out.
Jackson’s heavy reliance on some of the famous illustrators from before the movies at least gives them some connection; but it’s hard to remember how I imagined Moria before I saw the films.
The Soviet illustrations remind me of Samuri Jack.
I read my youngest The Hobbit recently and being familiar with Lord of The Rings and knowing there is a little disconnect between LOTR and the Hobbit ... I was still surprised by how much the Hobbit jumps from event to event and leaves things unsaid, but lingers other places a great deal. It feels almost unpolished.
Might not be a coincidence. Samurai Jack's creator, Genndy Tartakovsky, was born in 1970 in Soviet Moscow. Non-zero chance he might have seen this right as he was getting into drawing.
I found this starting with the recent XKCD comic about Tom Bombadil in LOTR, seeing he appeared in a 1991 Soviet TV adaptation that’s now on YouTube, checking here if anyone had posted it, and someone had provided the link to this book in that thread. Really cool find.
The cover shows that the book is authored by D-zh. R. R. Tolkin.
I'm interested in the J being represented by two characters. When a Russian name starts with a consonant cluster (as "John" does), is it conventional to use the entire cluster as an initial?
Yes, there is a principle of phonetic transliteration: the initial represents the sound in the language of origin. E.g. J. K. Rowling would be "D-zh": "Дж. К. Роулинг".
This leads to such things as English name "Charles" represented as "Ч." (Чарльз, "Ch"), but French name "Charles" as "Ш" (Шарль, "Sh"): "Ч. Дарвин" (Charles Darwin), "Ш. Перро" (Charles Perrault).
Similarly Finnish names with "J" will be represented by "Й" (Joukahainen) and Spanish by "Х" (Juan).
(1) If an author is named Vladimir, would the initial be "В" or "Вл"?
Usual English practice is to do initials purely by spelling. So Sharon Stone would be reduced to S. Stone, not Sh. Stone, even though no S-sound is present in the name.
(This is also the Chinese practice - Shanghai gets abbreviated SH, which feels appropriate until you realize that it's S for shang, H for hai.)
(2) How is Перро pronounced? Would that correspond better to Perrault or Pierrault?
(3) Why is Darwin "transliterated" with в rather than у?
(1) A Russian author may choose how to present his/her name so you may in fact see abbreviations like "Вл." (Владимир) оr "Евг." (Евгений, Eugene) and such. (For instance one of Moscow theaters is officially called "Театр имени Евг. Вахтангова". Here "Евг." is an abbreviation of the founder's name and is rendered exactly in this form.) But this is a part of an artistic expression. (After all, the name may be a pseudonym, so also an artistic creation. There is, for example, "И. Грекова" where the form is chosen because together it sounds like "игрек", Greek I; this is a pseudonym a math professor chose for her non-math writings.)
But a foreign author does not do that, of course. As far as I understand the algorithm is something like that: 1) abbreviate according to the language of origin; 2) see how this abbreviation will sound in that language; 3) represent this sound in Russian. Usually this amounts to looking up a previous decision on that name.
I think this is a common issue in cross-script translation.
(2) "Перро" should be more like "Perrault"; "Pierrault" would be "Пьеро" or "Пьер", more French-sounding.
(3) This is a custom. The sound "w" does not exist in Russian, so there is a choice how to represent it. Most often it is "в", but there is a tradition in rendering it as "у" if it is the first character. And it seems the choice changed over time, so Churchill is traditionally "Уинстон", but the cigarette brand "Winston" из "Винстон". In the middle of word it is almost always "в", but there are exceptions, such as "Хемингуэй" (Hemingway).
1) No, it's just Russian translators are aware that in English, Daniel and John start from different letters and want to indicate that. I think it's the only case of 2-letter initial in English->Russian translation. Can't recall any other cases, but maybe there are such with translations from other languages.
2) like Spanish perro, but accent on the last syllable, "perró". I think Pierrault would add a "soft sign", Пьерро.
3) There's no equivalent of W in Russian, and different translators take different ways - either В (v) or У (u). E.g. I read two translations of Sherlock Holmes with Watson being Уотсон and Ватсон.
Oh, well, correct, Spanish perro would be пэрро. The name Perrault is Перро and it's clear Е, not Э. But Pierrault would be definitely Пьерро, because of the i.
Also, sometimes in borrowed words everyone writes Е like in the original but pronounces Э, especially in the Western part of Russia. IDK exactly the reasons, may be it's just disgust for the letter Э, may be it's Ukrainian and Belarussian orthograhy influence, where Е is pronounced like Э.
Would be great to be able to reconstruct the whole story in the style of the images as a comic book or animation. Might be a nice job for the generative models of the future.
Google Search for an edition from Eastern Germany. Read it, when I was 10 years old (50 years ago!). It was long before all the fantasy hype, and it was magical. Klaus Ensikat was the illustrator.
It feels like the illustrator didn't read the book? The stone trolls are giants? (Am I missremembering that they were trolls?) And the battle is between two human armies. Surely goblins were described in Bilbo as not human barbarians?
They seemed a bit big to me too. Although I’m not sure to what extent that’s colored by modern interpretations.
When I was a kid and had encountered less fiction, the image of trolls that popped into my head from the Hobbit was more like Ogres in Warhammer, Warcraft, or DnD (the portrayal is pretty consistent, something like an enormous, crude, gluttonous man-like thing).
Nowadays trolls tend to be portrayed one step further toward the animalistic side. Even in the Lord of the Rings (as distinct from
The Hobbit) they’d gotten a bit more animalistic IIRC (then again, I need to reread the books, this might be colored by the movies).
There are very few descriptions of trolls in TLOTR. The troll that the Fellowship encounter in Moria has "a huge arm ... with a dark skin of greenish scales [and] a great, flat toeless foot". The mountain trolls who are intended to wield Grond in the siege of Minas Tirith aren't described at all.
None of them are anything like the vaguely comedic trolls in The Hobbit.
Trolls, like Jotun, can be both monstrous or humanlike. In Scandinavian folklore a troll is more of a broad category than a specific 'species'. The main thing is that they are malevolent and supernatural. Some trolls are grotesque creatures with a dozen heads, while others are so human like that they can exchange their children for human children without the human parents ever realizing. Following is from a Danish historic dictionary:
«1) according to folk belief: a supernatural being hostile to humans (dangerous) (of a more or less human-like form), especially of supernatural size and strength, ugly (creepy) appearance, thought to live in hills (mountains), forests, etc. (cf. Hill, Mountain, Sea, Forest troll and underground); also of smaller beings such as dwarfs or gnomes (Junge.308. NPWiwel.NS.22. Feilb. cf. Small troll)»
For what it’s worth I personally read The Hobbit for the first time as a child a few years after watching the first Harry Potter movie.
So when I read The Hobbit I imagined the trolls to be similar to the giant troll from the first Harry Potter movie. The one that goes after Hermione when she’s crying in the restroom and then Harry and Ron have to save her.
Tove Jansson, author of the Moomins, also illustrated "The Hobbit" in the 1960s.
Her version turned out controversial because Gollum is a giant compared to Bilbo. Turns out Tolkien hadn't described Gollum's size anywhere, and the author actually reworded future editions of the book to make it clear that Gollum is a small creature.
You can see the image here:
https://www.thepopverse.com/jrr-tolkien-the-hobbit-tove-jans...
In my opinion Jansson's "Hobbit" is a great interpretation by a legendary artist, and this Gollum controversy has overshadowed it too much.
The Soviet 1970s version (the OP link here) has an obvious debt to Jansson's illustrations, but the style is much more conventional and stiff. Jansson's linework and compositions are exquisite.
Fascinating - Jansson's artwork is lovely. Thank you for sharing it!
I think the huge Gollum is a very understandable misinterpretation, but I think it's likely false the text she worked from was ambiguous about Gollum's size.
If she was working from the 1951 revision, which seems likely if she was working in the 60s, then there is an explicit cue in the text showing that Gollum must be roughly Bilbo's size, when Bilbo is escaping the caves:
> Straight over Gollum’s head he jumped, seven feet forward and three in the air...
If Bilbo could jump over Gollum with a three-foot leap, Gollum cannot be a giant.
That said, it's well after the passage she illustrated, and would require a pretty attentive reader to catch, so as I said, the mistake is certainly understandable.
Additional caveat that I've not read the second edition of The Hobbit, only more recent ones, so it's conceivable that passage wasn't _exactly_ as I've quoted it.
I strongly suspect was largely as written, however, and even without the explicit numbers, if Bilbo jumps over Gollum, the inference remains largely the same.
> If Bilbo could jump over Gollum with a three-foot leap, Gollum cannot be a giant.
Agree (although Gollum was crouched down)
> I strongly suspect was largely as written, however, and even without the explicit numbers, if Bilbo jumps over Gollum, the inference remains largely the same
I'm guessing that the jump wasn't in the first edition at all, where Bilbo and Gollum apparently parted amicably.
Also the ring fits both Gollum and Bilbo, which limits how different in size they could be.
(LOTR says the ring can change size, but this wasn't discussed in the Hobbit, and presumably hadn't occurred to Tolkien yet when he wrote it).
Does Gollum even wear the ring in the original Hobbit? Or does he just carry his precious around?
It’s not specified - he never has the Ring in the Hobbit - Bible finds it before we meet him.
In LotR it’s revealed that he rarely wore it anymore by that time.
Bilbo doesn't see him wear it, but he's described as having put it on to steal goblin children for food. So he does wear it in the books.
Its on such an expedition that the ring "slips" from him, further suggesting the ring is actually not only his size, but a little large.
> Its on such an expedition that the ring "slips" from him, further suggesting the ring is actually not only his size, but a little large.
It's heavily implied in LOTR that the ring is able to change it's size to cause itself to slip from a person's finger, though that's somewhat out of scope and the illustrator may not have read that.
Thumb/pinkie?
>Her version turned out controversial because Gollum is a giant compared to Bilbo. Turns out Tolkien hadn't described Gollum's size anywhere
Cain and Abel, whom Deagol and Smeagol (Gollum) parallel, may have been giant themselves, given that Adam (their father) is specified in certain religious /apocryphal texts as being 60-100 cubits tall, or 90-150 feet.
that's a wild theory, considering that Tolkien himself described Gollum to be "a small, slimy creature" after the revisions, probably because of Jansson's depiction of him. and although the parallel is clear between many characters of the Hobbit and the Bible, do you have any credible sources that Tolkien took inspiration from apocryphal texts (or in this case the Hadith) ?
Not in this specific case. There are other examples that could be brought up, such as the Gift of Men (death), which may draw on the Book of Jubilees which suggests that death was given to man to limit wickedness and allow for renewal. Or Book of Enoch and the fall of Numenor. "Credible sources" will be difficult to procure as Tolkien notably avoided citing specific influences when discussing his works
> the author actually reworded future editions of the book to make it clear that Gollum is a small creature
The primary retconning occurred in 1951, when the encounter in The Hobbit between Bilbo and Gollum was rewritten to be confrontational rather than amicable, because TLOTR now needed the Ring to have a malevolent influence. The retconning is reflected in Bilbo's apology in the Council of Elrond to those (i.e. Gloin, but implicitly the readers) who may have heard a different version of his story. I'd love to see a first edition of the Hobbit to see what Tolkien actually did say about Gollum.
[Edit]. Just checked my (third edition) copy of The Hobbit. It only says that Gollum was "a small slimy creature" who "had a little boat". There aren't any other descriptions of their relative size, except that Bilbo actually jumps over Gollum's head when escaping him (Gollum is crouched down at this point), as a sibling comment has just observed.
https://www.ringgame.net/riddles.html
I don’t find “small” in reference to Gollum, but the leap does provide some maximum size limits.
There is a Facsimile Gift Edition which is pretty affordable:
https://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-Facsimile-Gift-Tolkien-author/...
Or, the differences in the texts are pretty thoroughly hashed out in:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12973638-the-history-of-...
which contains an annotated (and analyzed) text of the first edition.
I can see why one would think Gollum was huge early on. Without the context of the Lord of the Rings (where it’s established he was something like a hobbit before becoming Gollum), and also the fact that he ate goblins who wandered in his area of the caves, one might easily guess he was huge.
Most books are, sadly, quite worthless nowadays (monetary value). But the Tove Jansson illustrated, swedish edition of Bilbo is still a sought-after book that usually goes for hundreds of dollars.
Here is an ongoing auction on Tradera (the swedish ebay), currently at SEK 3050 (~$320):
https://www.tradera.com/item/341571/686383148/j-r-r-tolkien-...
>Most books are, sadly, quite worthless nowadays (monetary value).
I am not sure I understand. Aren't books "worthless" because they are readily available? Books are only expensive if they are rare (out of print, special limited edition, hand made or labor intensive, author signed, etc.). I don't think I would want "most" books to be rare and difficult to obtain.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to sell, or even give away, books. In Stockholm, Sweden, where I am most familiar with the situation, most charity second-hand stores no longer accept hardcover books at all. The monetary value of most second-hand books is so low that many end up being thrown away instead of recirculated.
Of course, there are rare antiquarian books that always find a buyer, but they are quite few. And perhaps nobody will mourn the vast number of cheap crime novels thrown away every day, but there is so much more: good, beautiful, high-quality books that happen to be out of fashion for the moment. These, too, are being thrown away.
It was a long time since public libraries aimed to maintain a somewhat curated (or complete-ish) collection. Nowadays it is all about statistics. If books are not borrowed often enough, they are removed from the shelves and disappear.
Perhaps I am overly pessimistic, but I fear that many, many books will, for all intents and purposes, be lost. There are so many books that aren't scanned/digitized.
There are plenty of books which are scarce but not sought after. Not necessarily because they lack intrinsic value but simply because they are forgotten. Beautifully crafted antique books which can be bought for almost nothing nowadays since the collector’s value isn’t there.
Not my experience - the Victorian books I bought cheap as a teenager I wouldn't even attempt to replace these days. Maybe the books I'm interested in held their value for some reason. (Just picked one at random, the exact binding I have isn't in abe, but the two closest, less decorative examples are 135GBP and 195GBP).
If you find someone who has cataloged and listed what they have, especially of “pre-ISBN” books you’re going to have a certain price floor. And if you want a book, likely others do, too.
But you also can find them and garage and thrift stores, languishing unsold.
Wonder Books has a concept of how to save them: https://booksbythefoot.com/about/
Which perhaps people buying books because how they look on the shelf is bad, but is it worse than the giant recycling grinder machine turning them into pulp to fuel Amazon’s Mordor-esque delivery furnaces?
This is only partly true. The fact that the OP is referring to is the fact that books aren't sought after. Many books that have been bought for a 100 dollars in 1980 are worth only a few dollars nowadays even if they are relevant. Not many people look for used books.
Or there is _The Old English Exodus_ which is four figures (and annoyingly, the son of the author gainsaid my request for permission to reprint).
Wow, printed in 1994
Yeah, look at that! Fourteenth edition. Then it stayed in print for more than 30 years. I guess earlier editions are even more expensive.
A bit strange though. So many editions should mean there are quite a few in circulation and that they aren't that rare, or pricey.
I always thought that the passages that talk about Smeagol before he was corrupted by the ring - made it rather easy to think of him as a hobbit or maybe a human.
Those come from the Lord of the Rings where Gandalf makes it clear that Gollum is/was a Hobbit or a very close relation.
What an incredible thing, had no idea this existed!
Nice! any more of her illustrations?
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As bonus trivia, depiction of Bilbo was based on the "short, round stature, expressive eyes, broad and open face" of the famous Soviet actor Yevgeniy Leonov (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Leonov).
In this video Leonov mentions this fact before reading an excerpt from the book: https://youtu.be/z7hEJxTBsTs
George Costanza is looking at those stamps and thinking he coulda been someone in the USSR
That's the most Hobbit-looking man I ever seen.
He actually says just that!
Basically, he says that he was approached by some random person and was gifted a copy of The Hobbit. This person turned out to be an illustrator of translated edition (same as at the OP's link) and he made Bilbo look like Leonov (the guy in the video).
As a footnote, Leonov famously voiced Soviet version of Winnie The Pooh in all its glorious 3 episodes:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnie-the-Pooh_(1969_film) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQmGXzNMw0E
I'm assuming you're not saying Tolkien based his description of Bilbo on that Leonov. Are you saying the illustrator based the illustrations on Leonov?
Does Leonov actually say that? Or just that the description and illustrations are similar to him?
In the video, Leonov says Belomlinskij (artist who made illustrations for this edition) himself gifted him this book and explained that he based Bilbo looks on Leonov.
Thanks. Youtube's auto caption + translate wasn't super understandable for me.
Here's that video in much better quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvNzEkS2B9U
He and Danny Devito would be such great Hobbits
Inconceivable!
I can’t compete with you physically, and you’re no match for my brains.
Wallace Shawn, another hobbit (also a great, if not the best, Ferengi).
My sister read me the first chapter of this edition of The Hobbit and refused to read me any more. So I had to read the rest myself to find out what happens. It became the first "grown up" book I ever finished.
When I read LoTR a few years later, these illustrations formed the images of what hobbits, dwarfs, and Gollum looked like in my minds' eye. Decades later, having seen the Peter Jackson films several times, Bilbo still looks wrong to me as I expect Leonov; Gollum looks wrong too for that matter.
> Gollum looks wrong too for that matter.
“Down the face of a precipice, sheer and almost smooth it seemed in the pale moonlight, a small black shape was moving with its thin limbs splayed out. […] The black crawling shape was now three-quarters of the way down, and perhaps fifty feet or less above the cliff's foot.[…] They peered down at the dark pool. A little black head appeared at the far end of the basin, just out of the deep shadow of the rocks.”
No visual version of Tolkien’s works could ever be made now which depicts Gollum accurately.
What do you mean? This seems accurate to how Gollum was depicted in the Peter Jackson movies.
Do you mean the skin color? The reference to the color black here is clearly there because Gollum is in the shadows in a darkened cave.
I grant you that it’s not clear-cut, but nowhere in the book (that I can find) is Gollum described as being pale, or even lightly colored (except his eyes). Instead, Gollum is frequently, as I showed, described as being “black” in color. He is also being misidentified as an Orc, which are similarily described.
Similar experience for me, except my imagery was influenced by the Brothers Hildebrandt. I collected all their cards and was obsessed with the detail in them.
Another illustrator from the 70's was Ingahild Grathmer[1] which was said to be a favourite by Tolkien himself[2]. Maybe he was polite because of the noteriaty (not sure if known at the time) but I do like them as well. Have a look at the documentary on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rNqVqzIxi3A&t=24m19s
(Go to 24:19 for Ingahild herself)
[1] a.k.a. Margrethe Alexandrine Þórhildur Ingrid (https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Margrethe_II_of_Denmark) [2] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/66764/time-queen-denmark...
Tolkien was generally favorable to any illustrations that followed the text; he actually explicitly mentioned that he was creating a “legendarium” which would have different interpretations.
What he didn’t like was illustrations by those who never even read the descriptions, or created things based on other media (Tolkien dwarves vs Snow White dwarfs, for example).
It's still on my to-be-read list, but anyone exploring the Russian/Tolkien rabbit hole might also like The Last Ringbearer, which is a retelling from the other side's perspective. The English translation was never officially published but is on archive.org and probably other less reputable sites.
If anyone is curious: https://archive.org/details/TheLastRingbearerSecondEdition/
Worth noting: the author, Kirill Yeskov, authored a great book on the Earth history and the old theories of it. And the reasons he wrote The Last Ringbearer, according to his (now deleted) blog, were 1) the geology of Tolkien's world was impossible, the landmass had to be bigger, 2) if the orcs were an army, there must have been a country, a money system, a bureacracy, a developed economy, and so on. From that country's perspective, the elves were a small bunch of rioters on the fringe of the empire.
It really is worth reading. And I say that as a die-hard Tolkien fan. Genuinely highly recommended.
In Bulgaria, our longest running comic magazine (Дъга ("Duga") e.g. Rainbow) had version of the Hobbit - https://www.endorion.org/books/comics/ - This was in fact the first version of the "books" I got exposed in, and then much later read the real stuff :)
Romanian 1975 edition of The Hobbit:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/581457001928701869/
https://tainthemeat.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/o-poveste-cu-un...
These are wonderful! Thank you neighbour!
The Soviets probably identified easier with the fact that someone would embark on a highly experimental adventure when prompted by a bearded guy.
The funny thing is the local communist newspaper "Red Truth" (as if there were non-communist ones, ...) published a review of LOTR in 1977, in which they pretty much took the side of the Mordor. (It might be a made-up joke from the 90s, but the spirit of absurdity is spot on for 1977.)
The reasoning was roughly:
* Mordor is obviously meant to be USSR, as it's in the east.
* The orcs are clearly heavy industry workers, building the world of future.
* Bilbo is obviously a son from a bourgeoisie family, disgusted by hard work.
* The west is represented by elves = aristocracy, people = bourgeoisie, hobbits = landowners.
* The group of reactionaries are afraid of a made up "threat from the east", led by Gandalf.
* Gandalf = a reactionary ideologue, keeping people in state of fear of progress and knowledge.
* Saruman = protector of the oppressed, declared a traitor and destroyed by the reactionaries.
* But socialism can't be destroyed by throwing something in the fire. All the power to Mordor, surrounded by reactionary neighbors.
Mordor revisionism is very popular in Russia(due to the reasons you already outlined).
See from example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer as perhaps the most famous from the genre
And these days many Russian ultra-patriots are proudly accepting the representation of Russia as Mordor and its soldiers as orcs in the war in Ukraine.
The outlined reasons are cartoonishly communist, but "The Last Ringbearer"'s worldview is not communist. It is more like "the West are liars". And yes, this does resonate in Russia.
Russia also has a fascination with "cryptohistory" as a legitimate form of fantasy, to a degree I've not seen in other countries.
Comrade Führer and other books as genre only exist in Russia I think.
Well, they are not entirely wrong: Tolkien was a big fan of "old England", as he saw it, with its primarily agricultural focus, and held rather dim view on industrialization and modernism. While Soviets of course were fanatics of industrialization and considered the petty bourgeoisie and kulaks (and Bagginses certainly look a lot like kulaks) their mortal enemies. Tolkien was very adamant that he does not do allegories, and yet the Soviets were right to consider him ideologically opposed to them. He was also a devout Catholic and ardent anti-Communist, so whether or not the Red Truth really declared him an enemy, they certainly would have strong reasons to.
This is unlikely, because "The lord of the rings" was translated much later. "The Hobbit" was first published in 1976, there was an announcement that there is more, but the first volume of "The Lord of the Rings" was published only in 1983.
I found an article in English [1] that mentions a newspaper article called "Tolkien's Cosmos" that does indeed find political meaning in "The Lord". But that article was written much later, in 1997. I cannot find the article itself, but judging from the time and the newspaper ("The Independent Newspaper", proudly liberal) I would guess the author was not a proponent of communism, but the opposite: he equated Mordor or Saruman with Soviet Union because he considered himself to be the part of the winning forces of the West.
[1] https://muse.jhu.edu/article/176070
In Hungary, the Lord of the Rings book was translated by Göncz Árpád who later went on to become President of Hungary.
Best credentials for a public servant if I ever saw one
I love their Gollum.
https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/archives/03gGWt8x1MUJt...
I enjoy all illustrations of LOTR & The Silmarillion from BEFORE the Jackson trilogy. I love the film adaptation but one could say that it's been _too_ influential in shaping the portrayal of Tolkien's characters and world.
Especially to people born after the movies came out.
Jackson’s heavy reliance on some of the famous illustrators from before the movies at least gives them some connection; but it’s hard to remember how I imagined Moria before I saw the films.
(2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26698736
The Soviet illustrations remind me of Samuri Jack.
I read my youngest The Hobbit recently and being familiar with Lord of The Rings and knowing there is a little disconnect between LOTR and the Hobbit ... I was still surprised by how much the Hobbit jumps from event to event and leaves things unsaid, but lingers other places a great deal. It feels almost unpolished.
Might not be a coincidence. Samurai Jack's creator, Genndy Tartakovsky, was born in 1970 in Soviet Moscow. Non-zero chance he might have seen this right as he was getting into drawing.
To me it feels exactly the right tone for a children’s book (which it is!)
If you're into various designs of Tolkien books, check out https://old.reddit.com/r/tolkienbooks/comments/vngd3x/isbn_g....
awesomebooks.com is a good resource for Americans wanting to purchase Harper Collins versions, though those versions are not always of better quality.
The illustration style reminds me of the villains from Rocky & Bullwinkle (1959-64), Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale - who were, as it were, Russian.
I love this! Anyone else seeing the resemblance to Bill Murray? https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/archives/03gGWt8x1MUJt...
I had that book as a kid and it was one of my favorite books at the time. Just seing these illustrations brings back so many memories. Thank you
I found this starting with the recent XKCD comic about Tom Bombadil in LOTR, seeing he appeared in a 1991 Soviet TV adaptation that’s now on YouTube, checking here if anyone had posted it, and someone had provided the link to this book in that thread. Really cool find.
The cover shows that the book is authored by D-zh. R. R. Tolkin.
I'm interested in the J being represented by two characters. When a Russian name starts with a consonant cluster (as "John" does), is it conventional to use the entire cluster as an initial?
Yes, there is a principle of phonetic transliteration: the initial represents the sound in the language of origin. E.g. J. K. Rowling would be "D-zh": "Дж. К. Роулинг".
This leads to such things as English name "Charles" represented as "Ч." (Чарльз, "Ch"), but French name "Charles" as "Ш" (Шарль, "Sh"): "Ч. Дарвин" (Charles Darwin), "Ш. Перро" (Charles Perrault).
Similarly Finnish names with "J" will be represented by "Й" (Joukahainen) and Spanish by "Х" (Juan).
Three questions:
(1) If an author is named Vladimir, would the initial be "В" or "Вл"?
Usual English practice is to do initials purely by spelling. So Sharon Stone would be reduced to S. Stone, not Sh. Stone, even though no S-sound is present in the name.
(This is also the Chinese practice - Shanghai gets abbreviated SH, which feels appropriate until you realize that it's S for shang, H for hai.)
(2) How is Перро pronounced? Would that correspond better to Perrault or Pierrault?
(3) Why is Darwin "transliterated" with в rather than у?
(1) A Russian author may choose how to present his/her name so you may in fact see abbreviations like "Вл." (Владимир) оr "Евг." (Евгений, Eugene) and such. (For instance one of Moscow theaters is officially called "Театр имени Евг. Вахтангова". Here "Евг." is an abbreviation of the founder's name and is rendered exactly in this form.) But this is a part of an artistic expression. (After all, the name may be a pseudonym, so also an artistic creation. There is, for example, "И. Грекова" where the form is chosen because together it sounds like "игрек", Greek I; this is a pseudonym a math professor chose for her non-math writings.)
But a foreign author does not do that, of course. As far as I understand the algorithm is something like that: 1) abbreviate according to the language of origin; 2) see how this abbreviation will sound in that language; 3) represent this sound in Russian. Usually this amounts to looking up a previous decision on that name.
I think this is a common issue in cross-script translation.
(2) "Перро" should be more like "Perrault"; "Pierrault" would be "Пьеро" or "Пьер", more French-sounding.
(3) This is a custom. The sound "w" does not exist in Russian, so there is a choice how to represent it. Most often it is "в", but there is a tradition in rendering it as "у" if it is the first character. And it seems the choice changed over time, so Churchill is traditionally "Уинстон", but the cigarette brand "Winston" из "Винстон". In the middle of word it is almost always "в", but there are exceptions, such as "Хемингуэй" (Hemingway).
1) No, it's just Russian translators are aware that in English, Daniel and John start from different letters and want to indicate that. I think it's the only case of 2-letter initial in English->Russian translation. Can't recall any other cases, but maybe there are such with translations from other languages.
2) like Spanish perro, but accent on the last syllable, "perró". I think Pierrault would add a "soft sign", Пьерро.
3) There's no equivalent of W in Russian, and different translators take different ways - either В (v) or У (u). E.g. I read two translations of Sherlock Holmes with Watson being Уотсон and Ватсон.
> I think Pierrault would add a "soft sign", Пьерро.
Really? That contradicts everything I've ever been told about the Russian alphabet. What's the difference between Перро and Пэрро?
Oh, well, correct, Spanish perro would be пэрро. The name Perrault is Перро and it's clear Е, not Э. But Pierrault would be definitely Пьерро, because of the i.
Also, sometimes in borrowed words everyone writes Е like in the original but pronounces Э, especially in the Western part of Russia. IDK exactly the reasons, may be it's just disgust for the letter Э, may be it's Ukrainian and Belarussian orthograhy influence, where Е is pronounced like Э.
This is a very interesting observation. I've only seen using several letters as an initial for foreign names.
I think that they sort of translated the English initial "J." rather than first translating the name and then forming an initial from it.
I still have this book! my mom reading this to me and my brother was my introduction to Tolkien.. very nostalgic.
My favorites are the ones on the 1960s paperback editions:
https://www.amazon.com/Towers-Authorized-Revised-Special-Foe...
I bought the whole set of those.
Would be great to be able to reconstruct the whole story in the style of the images as a comic book or animation. Might be a nice job for the generative models of the future.
I wonder if there are other sites that show the custom illustrations for the German, French, Spanish, and Japanese translations of JRRT’s books?
Google Search for an edition from Eastern Germany. Read it, when I was 10 years old (50 years ago!). It was long before all the fantasy hype, and it was magical. Klaus Ensikat was the illustrator.
https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=ensikat+illustration+h...
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They're really amazing. Thank you
Gotta love that spaghetti Golum, this is truly great stuff.
It was my first book by JRRT.
"Notice, comrades, how evil dragon sits on hoarded wealth."
no they are not brilliant, there were much better ones in Albrecht Durer style
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Brilliant? To me they are rather naive, childish
Which makes a lot of sense sense since The Hobbit is a children's book.
It feels like the illustrator didn't read the book? The stone trolls are giants? (Am I missremembering that they were trolls?) And the battle is between two human armies. Surely goblins were described in Bilbo as not human barbarians?
They seemed a bit big to me too. Although I’m not sure to what extent that’s colored by modern interpretations.
When I was a kid and had encountered less fiction, the image of trolls that popped into my head from the Hobbit was more like Ogres in Warhammer, Warcraft, or DnD (the portrayal is pretty consistent, something like an enormous, crude, gluttonous man-like thing).
Nowadays trolls tend to be portrayed one step further toward the animalistic side. Even in the Lord of the Rings (as distinct from The Hobbit) they’d gotten a bit more animalistic IIRC (then again, I need to reread the books, this might be colored by the movies).
There are very few descriptions of trolls in TLOTR. The troll that the Fellowship encounter in Moria has "a huge arm ... with a dark skin of greenish scales [and] a great, flat toeless foot". The mountain trolls who are intended to wield Grond in the siege of Minas Tirith aren't described at all.
None of them are anything like the vaguely comedic trolls in The Hobbit.
Interesting! I’d forgotten and, I think, entirely substituted in the movie version.
I thought the trolls were perfect. Big, unkempt, medium drunk. They should be a great deal bigger than Bilbo.
Ye reading some background it is the classical view of trolls as like big humans?
I mean orcs are wretched elfs so it makes sense to draw them very human in some sense.
I think my view was very much inspired by DnD. It is interesting to note how different this stuff were viewed at the time.
Trolls, like Jotun, can be both monstrous or humanlike. In Scandinavian folklore a troll is more of a broad category than a specific 'species'. The main thing is that they are malevolent and supernatural. Some trolls are grotesque creatures with a dozen heads, while others are so human like that they can exchange their children for human children without the human parents ever realizing. Following is from a Danish historic dictionary:
«1) according to folk belief: a supernatural being hostile to humans (dangerous) (of a more or less human-like form), especially of supernatural size and strength, ugly (creepy) appearance, thought to live in hills (mountains), forests, etc. (cf. Hill, Mountain, Sea, Forest troll and underground); also of smaller beings such as dwarfs or gnomes (Junge.308. NPWiwel.NS.22. Feilb. cf. Small troll)»
Just from reading the text itself. I’m well familiar with the D&D troll, but Tolkien’s trolls are just big ruffians covered in mutton grease.
For what it’s worth I personally read The Hobbit for the first time as a child a few years after watching the first Harry Potter movie.
So when I read The Hobbit I imagined the trolls to be similar to the giant troll from the first Harry Potter movie. The one that goes after Hermione when she’s crying in the restroom and then Harry and Ron have to save her.