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 …
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. …
In this post I’ll be looking at some Russian / Slavic hobbit illustrations I found that were not published, at least not in a book, as far as I know. This sweet pic depicts, I think, Gandalf and Bilbo after their adventure sharing a quiet moment together, or perhaps some ho-yay?** Gandalf is not wearing …
Yet more strange creatures sprung from the minds of Russian artists with views of hobbits unadulterated by the West. Take the one above. The hobbit is hard to see, but he’s at midcenter left, holding a sword, apparently miniaturized as he fights the spiders, who should be giant spiders. (The same scene is depicted ina …
After The Hobbit was published in the Soviet Union in 1976 the same translation was used for subsequent editions. The artists again featured those same furry feet and legs for Bilbo Baggins. Like the creature above who looks far from human-like with his claws, donkey ears, and misshapen face. Well, it’s an honest attempt at …
As I said in my last post, the first edition of The Hobbit was published in the Soviet Union in 1976 as a hardback children’s book. Translation was by Natalia Rakhmanova with illustrations by artist Mikhail Belomlinsky. Notice anything different about Bilbo? That’s right, his entire legs are hairy, not just his feet. That’s because …
Back to more SF sleaze. Here’s another book that makes no sense. The title may be referring to The Night Life of the Gods, the 1931 fantasy humor novel by Thorne Smith, which was mild whimsy about what happens when Greek Gods enter contemporary New York and have a night out on the town. But …
* smirk * The 1960s was a time period in which Playboy magazine type humor, the counterculture, and the SFF genre intertwined. Looking to cash in on these various trends, publishers released an astonishing variety of “adult” naughty novels embodying this robust, exploitive stew. The humor ranged from martini-dry to crass (as in the above …