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 the art presented here is a valid artistic take on a children’s book about a dragon.
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.)
If I had read this version as a kid, I’d be extremely confused as to why Gollum was 20 feet tall and wearing a flower crown. And then I’d be mad and consider it a bad illustration. (I’m aware some people think the original version didn’t specify his size. But the 1937 text states “Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature.”)
If there’s a character in a book who is known for wearing a red shirt, you might think it’s interesting to subvert expectations and give him a green shirt. But when the picture with the green shirt appears next to text describing a red shirt, it fails as an illustration. Especially in a book meant for children.
Should Aragorn wear pants in the illustrations?
So it's sort-of funny that she wound up pissing him off with artwork which didn't fit his mental model, when they both experienced people trying to do the translation and failing to hit the mark.
(I think I read this of both of them, in respective biographies)
Well, he was a hobbit once, right? So a 10 meters tall Gollum makes less sense than a Gollum that has about the same size as other hobbits, give or take.
This directly contradicts the article. I found the first edition online, and have determined you are mistaken.
http://searcherr.work/The%20Hobbit%201st%20ed%20(1937).pdf
Page 83: "Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum. I don't know where he came from, nor who or what he was."
Mind explaining the source of your mistake?
I'd only be vaguely offended if they had no grounded reason to think that I'm wrong (and they'd be calling me out for the sake of calling me out).
Communicating ideas is a part of tribalism too. Good brain chemicals when the tribe agrees and bad brain chemicals when they disagree.
Other languages adaptions had larger gollum's also - see some at e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/lotr/comments/vy7vij/before_the_196...
(It's difficult to find an excellent authoritative link clearly explaining that the change was in the 1966 edition - there is 'The History of The Hobbit' by John D. Rateliff, but I can't find it online)
But then again, I grew up with the Moomins.
Collected the newspaper strips and some novels.
It was all very incongruous and absurd… but then so are salt licorice, pickled herring, and many other Scandinavian things that aren’t to everyone’s taste.
I found the Tolkien Calendar edition which used Jansson’s art. I find it adorable. No one else does.
I can see why Tolkien lovers are upset at these even though I'm not really one of them.
This despite the fact that some names and elements were re-used. He often cycled the same names around until he found where they fit. Which also makes reading early drafts of the Hobbit fun when Thorin was named Gandalf.
By the time we read LOTR she was eight, and we never did finish ROTK because the Frodo and Sam parts really do drag on (I get that he wrote them this way so that the reader would get a sense of just how arduous the journey was, but...)
The moomins starts with a great flood that washes them all away to live in a new place (I think this is a parallel to the Finns moving out of Karelia after the war. I believe this was the largest migration of people that had occured at the time, and it has been described as causing generational trauma to the Finnish).
In addition I believe MoominPappa deals with issues of depression or something?
There are some seriously dark themes in there - and unlike in Tolkien, the protagonists are completely helpless when facing them. No epic battle in which magical eagles and a magical bear show up to save the day.
Mostly just trying to contextualise the moomins with some info I found interesting and unexpected given that it looks like a children's show about anthropomorphic hippos.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/jrr-tolkiens-estat...
https://tolkiengateway.net/w/images/2/20/J.R.R._Tolkien_-_Th...
> The translation of the name 'Hobbit' to 'Hompe' was not the only thing that annoyed Tolkien about this edition. Already in 1948, he wrote to Rosemary, a young fan, that "the picture of Gollum in the Swedish edition of The Hobbit makes him look huge."
https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Hompen
Overall seems like a weird edition.
The 1973 Ballantine editions carried only Tolkien’s own paintings on the covers and slipcase.
I only learned of her involvement after becoming a huge Jansson fan. I had to take another look at the Emu.
[1]: https://arrgle.com/emus-and-piracy-the-story-behind-the-lord...
As presented, Gollum is badly off, I reckon - missing the books textual description. The flowers are out of line.
The dragon scene is wonderful and captures the situation.
The dwarves are a bit dopy looking but I think could cohere with the early introduction in the Hobbit.
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 have Jansson to thank for the clarification, it seems!
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 unreliable narrator.)
> 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.
Perhaps even Bilbo himself. :) One can imagine him telling a heavily fictionalized version of his adventures to some impressionable young hobbits.
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 expansive creative endeavor? I always assumed it had been pre-built in his mind then spilled out in ink (As a sequence of events).
It's doubtless still possible to find that version, I read it in an old country library that had it on the shelf since the 1950s.
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 movie rights. Made in 30 days!
Being deeply embedded in that culture myself, I must admit that these illustrations don’t appeal to me at all, and don’t match my mental imagery of the story. But I can see how they might have looked like a perfect fit to someone who read The Hobbit with a fresh eye when it was still fresh. I wish I could have read it like that.
The problem with these modern artists is they're not working hard to improve a skill, but rather keep doing more of what comes easy hoping the world maybe recognizes their "natural genius" ... as a result they go hard on pushing that one thing unique to them (whatever it is, scriblles, splashes, infantile characters) ...
And yeah let's not forget the "you just don't understand modern art" shaming.
First of, the illustrations are great. I love them.
Separate though, if they don't represent the original material then why not just make some new IP instead if effectively taking a piss on someone else's?
Alastair Reynolds once expressed this sentiment in a nice way:
I didn’t want to be slavishly bound by the earlier story. So I made the decision that House of Suns would take its cue from the events and characters in the shorter piece, but it wouldn’t be afraid to contradict them if that made for a better story.
I'd be particularly interested in seeing more of her illustrations for Alice in Wonderland and The Hunting of the Snark (the latter is a great poem if you haven't read it: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29888/29888-h/29888-h.htm)
I seem to recall thinking Gollum was big, but honestly could be remembering the Shelov scene. It was long time ago.
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.
> "She even made some of the characters especially tiny to elevate the landscapes." wish there were more examples of this in the images shown in the article.
Here are some book covers:
https://www.amazon.com/Hobitti-eli-Sinne-ja-takaisin/dp/9510... https://www.amazon.com/Hobbitten-Eller-Ud-hjem-igen/dp/87023...
She even made some of the characters especially tiny to elevate the landscapes.
The illustrations consisted more of her impression of the story than literal repetitions, which many Tolkien fans found unsatisfying.
According to them, Jansson overlooked many of the central characteristics of the characters.
...she edited the pictures many times to avoid them being too much like the Moomin illustrations.
However, the readers saw the illustrations as more Jansson like than truly Tolkien like."
Tove Jansson's criticized illustrations of The Hobbit (2023)
https://tovejansson.com/hobbit-tolkien/