I saw someone wearing a tshirt with this design and thought it was hilarious! The “dungie” refers to the Dungeness crab at the lower left, which are renowned as a delicacy in the Pacific Northwest. The artist’s name is Ray Troll. He’s a native Alaskan known for his unique style and scientific accuracy of the creatures he paints. More of his work can be seen here.
“To a know a dinosaur, you must first know a chicken.”
These common farmyard birds, developed from Asian junglefowl around 8,000 years ago, show many of the same characteristics of the prehistoric creatures they are descended from. They strut about on two legs, have plumage, scaled, robust clawed feet, are warm-blooded, and lay eggs, They are intelligent, social, and gregarious. It’s ironic that we, members of the mammal group, eat them now, whereas the opposite was true many millions of years ago. Chickens still have a dinosaur ferocity about them; YouTube videos show them attacking and eating snakes and even mice.
Over the years, as the versatile fowl spread around the world, many different breeds were developed. The poster above shows some of them. Breeds also go in and out of style; some rarer or forgotten breeds are undergoing a renaissance among backyard chicken keepers and hobbyists. Names given to these breeds are fanciful, often reflecting places of origin or physical characteristics. One such breed, the Leghorn, even gave its name to the immortal Warner Brothers cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn, who desplays the characteristics of the breed: White feathers, yellow beak and legs, and a red serrated crest — what most people would think of when you say the word “chicken.”
Below are names for breeds which never existed, but might have.
| Royal Harlequin
Three-toed Corncracker Wattled Gypsy Sudanese Nodding Hen Flowerfoot Earless Blue Dusseldorf Brown Furrowhead Gripoone Korean Splittail Sprintzel Ransruffle Phoenician Fighting Cock |
Amish Snowy
Golden Sharpshin Strawberry Sultan Puffbill Highlands Rondelle Kentucky Hills Scratcher Eastern Moslad Luego Finnish Greyhelm Sprecha di Morga Santa Isela Kokakee Mormon Spotted |
Twumke’s Chronicle of Mazes
In the AD&D universe one of the most prized treasure items a magic-user character could discover was a book of magic, because it gained access to a range of spells and not just the one or two that the player gained with each level. That’s the way it started out, anyway. Things might have changed.
With the years, as new campaigns were introduced by TSR, and later Wizards of the Coast, the concept of spell book began to change. I guess someone, somewhere, got tired with the printed model and decided to what-if. What if the spells were written on papyrus and rolled up in a dragonhide? What if they were etched on metal and clenched together with adamantite clasps? What if they were written between the furls of a flag? And on and on. I found this tiresome.
Of more interest to me were books that were magic, but not necessarily spellbooks. Early AD&D had a range of these, essentially ways for a player to level up in class or abilities when they read the whole thing. For example, The Manual of Steadily Pilfering, once read and studied by thieves, gave them enough experience points to reach the next level. There were also books for different alignments and books to gain points in basic abilities (intelligence, strength, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, and charisma.) These I felt were more democratic as anyone could use them.
Taking this to the next level, I’m sure there were hybrid magic books, magic books to gain other abilities, cursed magic books, and magic books that have no clear purpose at all.
| The Bitter Book of the Peach: A leather-bound tome with the image of a peach and peach leaves embossed on the front. Contains a good number of handwritten, mid-level spells, but all of them run off the page and aren’t continued on the other side, rendering them useless, and the owner, embittered. However, skilled mages have a 25% of having enough knowledge to complete any single spell themselves.
The Blissful Libram of Knots: Contains instructions to tie dozens of different knots, some of them magical. In addition, the exercises are so soothing and intricate the reader actually gains a temporary hit point from being so relaxed. Book of Sprouts: A small but very thick book that identifies plants through their sproutlings, with hundreds of beautiful watercolors painted on thin paper that looks to be made of pressed fairies’ wings. Very valuable to druids. Studying the book improves one’s botany or horticulture skills up to 35%. Catalog of Elven Stool: Contains pictures of Elven excrement and how to analyze it to determine health problems. Of not much interest to other races, but Elven healers prize it. Owners will see their diagnostic abilities raised by 10% – 25%. A Comic Guide to Rum: A history of this alcoholic beverage written in such a humorous tone the reader will start to laugh, and the magic effect will cause those around them to start laughing drunkenly, too, as if they all had a swig from the same bottle. The Eldritch Monograph of Eyes: Contains detailed drawings of Accursed creatures’ eyes, providing a means to identify them even when they are in disguise (as Accursed creatures can never change this facial feature). Fegwen’s Fragrance Folio: This book looks full of blank pages, but looks are deceiving – each page references a specific scent, and putting one’s nose to the paper allows the reader to experience that scent and know immediately what it is. The Fragrance Folio contains only pleasant and neutral smells. Its twin volume, Fegwen’s Odor Omnibus, contains foul smells, some of them so awful they can make the reader pass out. Anyone who reads the whole of either book will be able to correctly identify those smells in the future. A Guidebook to Wizardly Skullcaps: Wizards, especially older ones, are fond of wearing skullcaps that convey their place of origin, power level and magic specialties to other magic-users. This book, laden with full-colour pictures, allows the novice adventurer to do the same thing. Manual of Harness and Tunnel: A book about Dwarven mining techniques, including their use of donkeys and mules to aid in hauling rock to the surface. There’s an aura of magic about it but little actual magic in it. Know, however, that the Dwarven clan whose secrets were stolen have been actively tracking it down for decades, and are not above murder to get it back. So buyer beware. A Robust Guide to Mercenary Employment: A self-help book for sell-swords and other mercenaries on finding profitable employment. After reading the book, their charisma is raised in the eyes of prospective employers and they are 50% more likely to book a job. The effect lasts for a number of months. After gaining a job the mercenary has no more use for the book and usually sells it or gives it away to a friend, keeping it in continuous circulation. Sephran’s Book of Death Rituals: Scholarly book about burial rites of different civilizations. Any necromancer worth his or her salt will have this in their library. Studying it gives any magic they do a 10% greater success rate. It has no effect on other types of magic-users. Twumke’s Chronicle of Mazes: Thick, chunky reference book that contains a history of mazes and labyrinths, a listing of some notable ones, and lastly, how to build one. At the end are several maze-related spells that are of interest to mages but gibberish to everyone else. The Wondrous Omnibus of the Orb: Contains a variety of articles, each by a different mage, concerning the creation of orbs, drifting balls of luminous light. The articles range from theoretical ruminations to spell tips and variations. This book was created to be in the library of a now-vanished school of magic and is larger and heavier than usual. |
All good things must come to an end, so does my two-month journey into all things Middle-earth. Like these guys are doing, I’m moving on to other shores.
(It’s a still from a little-aired 1993 Finnish TV version of LOTR. I’m guessing, counterclockwise from the fat left, the characters are Boromir, who looks appropriately dopey and anguished, like a wounded bull; Merry/Pippin and Merry/Pippin, both seated with arms folded; Sam kneeling at the back putting his hand on Frodo’s shoulder — who I know is Frodo because he’s the most conventionally handsome; in back of him, aragorn in black with a boatpole and a Luis Ruyo upknot; behind him a glum-looking Legolas holding a bow. That leaves the last figure as Gimli.)
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!
Artists’ ideas of what a Dwarf woman might look like
One of the elements that got fans so excited about The Rings of Power was its focus on Dwarves and their society, including their wives and female children. Aha! We might finally see what bearded Dwarven women looked like!
Well, no, they turned out to be facial-hair free. Though in one episode from Season 2, I thought I detected some stubble on a group of gals. Not a deal-breaker for me, I enjoyed the series well enough.
Before this, a suitably bearded Dwarven jewelry seller turned up in a market scene in The Battle of the Five Armies. She was the only one, and I missed her cameo (granted, I wasn’t paying close attention to the movie) but it raised possibilities.
I think Dwarven women would be proud of their soft, silky beards, seeing them as part of their femininity and what sets them apart from men. They would braid these silky strands, or ornament them with jewelry. Different mining settlements would have different styles. Perhaps in Khazad-dum it was the style at the time to be clean-shaven, hence Disa’s being beardless. The writers might have have given an offhand comment somewhere, like a dwarf saying “You know, in Brazalbhruzum the women wear their beards long, gives a man something to tickle his nose with.” There! Solved it. Season three is filming now, so maybe…?
As Dwarves keep their own language a secret from outsiders, their names are of the Mannish variety. I generated this list to sound German and Norse and suitably Wagnerian-sounding.
| Basra
Berilka Berta Bevra Dhovrë Eglanyd Eikar Ferdya Flenda Grilda Hukkë Hultha Husta Kosgrulda |
Lummi
Magnebel Nanda Nenda Sklathe Skoghe Storsha Thamië Thina Thutara Ulga Umma Vanda Yora |
Simbakubwa kutokaafrika, or the Hyena-lion: the real Warg?
Though Tolkien described the landscapes of Middle-earth in great detail, he didn’t go much into its animal life, and when he did it was similar to what you’d encounter on a walk in the English countryside. With the addition of various fell creatures, of course. But these were met only if you wandered far and were out on an adventure.
Nevertheless, I thought I’d talk about what kind of ecosystem this Europe-sized piece of land possibly held. Who ate who, and who was at the top?
Slavic nations certainly had some unusual Hobbits, but what of the rest of Europe? Let’s see.
This underground comix- inspired Bilbo is tied with this one as the most horrible Hobbit depiction of all time. It’s a J’ai Lu publication, which is par for the course. Is he fighting a troll? An aardvark? Who knows.
A German Hobbit in that very annoying late 1960s semi-abstract children’s book style which could be cranked out very quickly by the artist. I didn’t like it as a child, and I still don’t like it now. Not least because Gollum is just an amorphous mass and not a real being. C’mon, the artist wasn’t even trying.
Up, up, and away with a Gorilla-footed Bilbo who is wearing a t-shirt with his own name on it, plus suspenders! He looks like Jeremy Boob from the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine cartoon. To add to the 1960s feel the art director used a crazy daisy font for “Hobbit.” The Smaug isn’t bad, but he’s in a completely different style, and he’s crying! That’s not the Smaug from the book!
Then there’s this very weird Fred Flintstone Hobbit from Russia who has only three toes and four fingers, and a single tooth front and center. He looks more like an ogre like than a diminuitive Hobbit, towering over the dwarves to his rear. And I know Tolkien mentioned Hobbits had red, rosy cheeks, but Bilbo’s is all over red, like a devil’s.
I wonder if the promoters got permission from the Tolkien Estate for this?
I had a long discussion with my sister about how many miles, exactly, Frodo and Sam traveled from their home in The Shire to the pits of Mt. Doom. Oddly, this information wasn’t readily apparent online, for all the Tolkien websites and maps and graphics out there. After some digging, I came up with this.
For those in the U.S., his trip began in Horton, Kansas, near the Kikapoo Indian Reservation, ended up in Fernandina Beach, Florida. That’s quite a walk, and transposable to a regular mileage map I guess. But I knew there was something better out there.
This site, courtesy of The Lord of the Rings Project, has an interactive graph showing you the days and miles walked per book. Much better!
To answer the question, it’s 1,800 miles. Those Hobbit feet must have been pretty calloused.