1976 Soviet edition of 'The Hobbit' (2015)
mashable.com
mashable.com
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.
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.
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.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 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.
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.
(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).
In LotR it’s revealed that he rarely wore it anymore by that time.
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.
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-...
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.
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?
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.
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.
In this video Leonov mentions this fact before reading an excerpt from the book: https://youtu.be/z7hEJxTBsTs
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
Does Leonov actually say that? Or just that the description and illustrations are similar to him?
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.
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.
(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...
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).
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/581457001928701869/
https://tainthemeat.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/o-poveste-cu-un...
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.
See from example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer as perhaps the most famous from the genre
Comrade Führer and other books as genre only exist in Russia I think.
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.
A very good one, Vaclav Havel, who BTW pioneered typographical poetry.
https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/archives/03gGWt8x1MUJt...
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.
Especially to people born after the movies came out.
awesomebooks.com is a good resource for Americans wanting to purchase Harper Collins versions, though those versions are not always of better quality.
https://www.amazon.com/Towers-Authorized-Revised-Special-Foe...
I bought the whole set of those.
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?
I think that they sort of translated the English initial "J." rather than first translating the name and then forming an initial from it.
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?
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.
Really? That contradicts everything I've ever been told about the Russian alphabet. What's the difference between Перро and Пэрро?
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.
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).
https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=ensikat+illustration+h...
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.
«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)»
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).
None of them are anything like the vaguely comedic trolls in The Hobbit.
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.