I'm vaguely aware of what the Moomin are, yet I really like these drawings. Ok, unsure about Gollum, but the dwarves and the dragon rock.
Tove Jansson's criticized illustrations of The Hobbit (2023)
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Re: Tove Jansson's criticized illustrations of The Hobbit (2023)
#52I'm a fan of Tolkien's art and have a couple of prints on my wall, The Hill and The Tree of Amalion. They have been up for years now and I haven't gotten a bit tired of them. They convey Tolkien's voice to me almost as effectively as his books. He didn't need an illustrator.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/jrr-tolkiens-estat...
https://tolkiengateway.net/w/images/2/20/J.R.R._Tolkien_-_Th...
Re: Tove Jansson's criticized illustrations of The Hobbit (2023)
#53The dragon is just great. These are so charming.
I've been thinking about that illustration of Smaug for nearly 40 years and I never knew where it came from (I didn't recall it was from a Tolkien-related thing, but I remember it vividly otherwise)! I must have seen it at a friend's or the library since as far as I know we never had these at home.
Re: Tove Jansson's criticized illustrations of The Hobbit (2023)
#54Those are wonderful! It's really interesting to see Jansson's take on the characters and settings. When I read _The Hobbit_ in the early 1970s, there was already a well established tradition of how to portray Tolkien's world. Jansson's seems very fresh to me. Also of interest, and probably just as upsetting to some, is Gene Deitch's version of _The Hobbit_ which was made in the mid 1960s in an attempt to retain the m…
lolz. I am so glad you told me why it was made. Otherwise it would be completely unforgivable.
Re: Tove Jansson's criticized illustrations of The Hobbit (2023)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clarifying question -- what do you mean Gollum was not yet a Hobbit? I don't think he ever was - but a river folk before the ring deprived him wasn't he? I never read first edition so I suspect there are some differences as you allude. (ring not being the ring). Actually - in the creative process did he kick off the Hobbit then expand into the world building as an after thought and turn the one ring into this wild ex…
In the original version, there is minimal physical description of Gollum (it was dark after all) and the ring was simply a magic ring that granted invisibility. Gollum lost it and IIRC he just let Bilbo go. They whole idea of him being some hobbit-like creature corrupted by the One Ring was not present at all. It was one of a series of fairy-tale adventures no more important than the trolls turning to stone. Bilbo ne…
https://www.ttrpbc.com/discussion/532/the-hobbit-first-vs-se... has the changes.
Re: Tove Jansson's criticized illustrations of The Hobbit (2023)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As presented, Gollum is badly off, I reckon - missing the books textual description. The flowers are out of line. This is addressed in the article. "Paul Gravett writes in his new book about Tove Jansson: ‘Her Gollum towered monstrously large, to the surprise of Tolkien himself, who realized that he had never clarified Gollum’s size and so amended the second edition to describe him as ‘a small, slimy creature’." We…
Tolkien made significant changes to the Gollum chapter. In the first edition Gollum gives up the ring willingly. The ring was not yet the Ring, and Gollum was not yet a Hobbit. The man took retcons as an intellectual challenge. Sometimes the retcon itself spun off a whole new story. But it makes The Hobbit really incompatible with its own sequel, even after his changes. (You have to read it as having a very unreliabl…
From the prologue of The Lord of the Rings:
> Now it is a curious fact that this is not the story as Bilbo first told it to his companions. To them his account was that Gollum had promised to give him a present, if he won the game; but when Gollum went to fetch it from his island he found the treasure was gone: a magic ring, which had been given to him long ago on his birthday. Bilbo guessed that this was the very ring that he had found, and as he had won the game, it was already his by right. But being in a tight place, he said nothing about it, and made Gollum show him the way out, as a reward instead of a present. This account Bilbo set down in his memoirs, and he seems never to have altered it himself, not even after the Council of Elrond. Evidently it still appeared in the original Red Book, as it did in several of the copies and abstracts. But many copies contain the true account (as an alternative), derived no doubt from notes by Frodo or Samwise, both of whom learned the truth, though they seem to have been unwilling to delete anything actually written by the old hobbit himself.
Re: Tove Jansson's criticized illustrations of The Hobbit (2023)
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tolkien made significant changes to the Gollum chapter. In the first edition Gollum gives up the ring willingly. The ring was not yet the Ring, and Gollum was not yet a Hobbit. The man took retcons as an intellectual challenge. Sometimes the retcon itself spun off a whole new story. But it makes The Hobbit really incompatible with its own sequel, even after his changes. (You have to read it as having a very unreliabl…
> You have to read it as having a very unreliable narrator. Perhaps even Bilbo himself. :) One can imagine him telling a heavily fictionalized version of his adventures to some impressionable young hobbits.
That's how I've always imagined it - The Hobbit as published is the story told as if intended for children (hobbit or otherwise), but the 'actual' in-universe events were just as dark and realistic as the tone of The Lord of the Rings.
Re: Tove Jansson's criticized illustrations of The Hobbit (2023)
#58"Snuffkin (Snusmumriken) and the ring", that's what I see. Or Mummy troll. I saw some cartoon adaptations of the LotR, never liked it much because of the dead seriousness, but this makes it carelessness, which probably could have made me read it.
Re: Tove Jansson's criticized illustrations of The Hobbit (2023)
#59Well ... it looks more like a midget-man than a hobbit. But what exactly is a hobbit? In the movie "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" from 2001, the hobbits shown pissed me off. When they started to jump on the bed, I started to root for Sauron. It got much better in the movie "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" from 2012 but even then they look mostly just like midget humans, with a bit of an elfish touch (and I hated the elves in the movie from 2001; the depiction was just lame). The only hobbit-like entity I liked was Gollum.
So how does a hobbit really look like? "Tolkien presented hobbits as a variety of humanity, or close relatives thereof".
So based on this, while Tove's pictures look more like a parody, I don't really see it as intrinsically wrong. It's just less of a "standard" depiction - Tolkien could have assumed hobbits to be anything but midget-humans, but they are mostly midgets with stronger feet.
Re: Tove Jansson's criticized illustrations of The Hobbit (2023)
#60It has a real “where the wild things are” feel…which is the art used to decorate my local library. A lot of people have chosen to take the Hobbit as seriously as its older brother—-including Peter Jackson—-and have missed out on the absurd, beautiful childishness of the whole thing. The Hobbit does a wonderful job of introducing the ideas and characters of LotR in a way which is accessible for children and I think th…
"absurd, beautiful childishness of the whole thing"
There is the bed-jumping scene, so there is childishness in the movies too. (I also hated that scene; I started to root for Sauron when I saw that scene.)