Tove Jansson, author of the Moomins, also illustrated "The Hobbit" in the 1960s.
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.
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.
NateEag 8 hours ago [-]
Fascinating - Jansson's artwork is lovely. Thank you for sharing it!
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.
KineticLensman 7 hours ago [-]
> If Bilbo could jump over Gollum with a three-foot leap, Gollum cannot be a giant.
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.
simplicio 6 hours ago [-]
Also the ring fits both Gollum and Bilbo, which limits how different in size they could be.
(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).
actionfromafar 1 hours ago [-]
Thumb/pinkie?
CGMthrowaway 9 hours ago [-]
>Her version turned out controversial because Gollum is a giant compared to Bilbo. Turns out Tolkien hadn't described Gollum's size anywhere
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.
antx 2 hours ago [-]
that's a wild theory, considering that Tolkien himself described Gollum to be "a small, slimy creature" after the revisions, probably because of Jansson's depiction of him. and although the parallel is clear between many characters of the Hobbit and the Bible, do you have any credible sources that Tolkien took inspiration from apocryphal texts (or in this case the Hadith) ?
CGMthrowaway 28 minutes ago [-]
Not in this specific case. There are other examples that could be brought up, such as the Gift of Men (death), which may draw on the Book of Jubilees which suggests that death was given to man to limit wickedness and allow for renewal. Or Book of Enoch and the fall of Numenor. "Credible sources" will be difficult to procure as Tolkien notably avoided citing specific influences when discussing his works
KineticLensman 8 hours ago [-]
> the author actually reworded future editions of the book to make it clear that Gollum is a small creature
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.
Most books are, sadly, quite worthless nowadays (monetary value). But the Tove Jansson illustrated, swedish edition of Bilbo is still a sought-after book that usually goes for hundreds of dollars.
Here is an ongoing auction on Tradera (the swedish ebay), currently at SEK 3050 (~$320):
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.
vodou 3 hours ago [-]
It is becoming increasingly difficult to sell, or even give away, books. In Stockholm, Sweden, where I am most familiar with the situation, most charity second-hand stores no longer accept hardcover books at all. The monetary value of most second-hand books is so low that many end up being thrown away instead of recirculated.
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.
winnit 3 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of books which are scarce but not sought after. Not necessarily because they lack intrinsic value but simply because they are forgotten. Beautifully crafted antique books which can be bought for almost nothing nowadays since the collector’s value isn’t there.
pineaux 3 hours ago [-]
This is only partly true. The fact that the OP is referring to is the fact that books aren't sought after. Many books that have been bought for a 100 dollars in 1980 are worth only a few dollars nowadays even if they are relevant. Not many people look for used books.
mongol 1 hours ago [-]
Wow, printed in 1994
dumbidiot 8 hours ago [-]
I can see why one would think Gollum was huge early on. Without the context of the Lord of the Rings (where it’s established he was something like a hobbit before becoming Gollum), and also the fact that he ate goblins who wandered in his area of the caves, one might easily guess he was huge.
VincentEvans 3 hours ago [-]
I always thought that the passages that talk about Smeagol before he was corrupted by the ring - made it rather easy to think of him as a hobbit or maybe a human.
WalterBright 6 hours ago [-]
Nice! any more of her illustrations?
mlinhares 9 hours ago [-]
What an incredible thing, had no idea this existed!
baybal2 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
georgecmu 11 hours ago [-]
As bonus trivia, depiction of Bilbo was based on the "short, round stature, expressive eyes, broad and open face" of the famous Soviet actor Yevgeniy Leonov (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Leonov).
George Costanza is looking at those stamps and thinking he coulda been someone in the USSR
Raztuf 10 hours ago [-]
That's the most Hobbit-looking man I ever seen.
abcd_f 7 hours ago [-]
He actually says just that!
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:
I'm assuming you're not saying Tolkien based his description of Bilbo on that Leonov. Are you saying the illustrator based the illustrations on Leonov?
Does Leonov actually say that? Or just that the description and illustrations are similar to him?
demaga 6 hours ago [-]
In the video, Leonov says Belomlinskij (artist who made illustrations for this edition) himself gifted him this book and explained that he based Bilbo looks on Leonov.
pelasaco 8 hours ago [-]
He and Danny Devito would be such great Hobbits
RyanOD 7 hours ago [-]
Inconceivable!
pineaux 3 hours ago [-]
I can’t compete with you physically, and you’re no match for my brains.
aleyan 9 hours ago [-]
My sister read me the first chapter of this edition of The Hobbit and refused to read me any more. So I had to read the rest myself to find out what happens. It became the first "grown up" book I ever finished.
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.
teddyh 21 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
Tallain 4 hours ago [-]
Similar experience for me, except my imagery was influenced by the Brothers Hildebrandt. I collected all their cards and was obsessed with the detail in them.
clan 7 hours ago [-]
Another illustrator from the 70's was Ingahild Grathmer[1] which was said to be a favourite by Tolkien himself[2]. Maybe he was polite because of the noteriaty (not sure if known at the time) but I do like them as well. Have a look at the documentary on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/rNqVqzIxi3A&t=24m19s
It's still on my to-be-read list, but anyone exploring the Russian/Tolkien rabbit hole might also like The Last Ringbearer, which is a retelling from the other side's perspective. The English translation was never officially published but is on archive.org and probably other less reputable sites.
Worth noting: the author, Kirill Yeskov, authored a great book on the Earth history and the old theories of it. And the reasons he wrote The Last Ringbearer, according to his (now deleted) blog, were 1) the geology of Tolkien's world was impossible, the landmass had to be bigger, 2) if the orcs were an army, there must have been a country, a money system, a bureacracy, a developed economy, and so on. From that country's perspective, the elves were a small bunch of rioters on the fringe of the empire.
Wildgoose 9 hours ago [-]
It really is worth reading. And I say that as a die-hard Tolkien fan. Genuinely highly recommended.
malkia 9 hours ago [-]
In Bulgaria, our longest running comic magazine (Дъга ("Duga") e.g. Rainbow) had version of the Hobbit - https://www.endorion.org/books/comics/ - This was in fact the first version of the "books" I got exposed in, and then much later read the real stuff :)
In Hungary, the Lord of the Rings book was translated by Göncz Árpád who later went on to become President of Hungary.
michaeldoron 8 hours ago [-]
Best credentials for a public servant if I ever saw one
apples_oranges 7 hours ago [-]
The Soviets probably identified easier with the fact that someone would embark on a highly experimental adventure when prompted by a bearded guy.
pgaddict 6 hours ago [-]
The funny thing is the local communist newspaper "Red Truth" (as if there were non-communist ones, ...) published a review of LOTR in 1977, in which they pretty much took the side of the Mordor. (It might be a made-up joke from the 90s, but the spirit of absurdity is spot on for 1977.)
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.
mamonster 5 hours ago [-]
Mordor revisionism is very popular in Russia(due to the reasons you already outlined).
And these days many Russian ultra-patriots are proudly accepting the representation of Russia as Mordor and its soldiers as orcs in the war in Ukraine.
smsm42 41 minutes ago [-]
Well, they are not entirely wrong: Tolkien was a big fan of "old England", as he saw it, with its primarily agricultural focus, and held rather dim view on industrialization and modernism. While Soviets of course were fanatics of industrialization and considered the petty bourgeoisie and kulaks (and Bagginses certainly look a lot like kulaks) their mortal enemies. Tolkien was very adamant that he does not do allegories, and yet the Soviets were right to consider him ideologically opposed to them. He was also a devout Catholic and ardent anti-Communist, so whether or not the Red Truth really declared him an enemy, they certainly would have strong reasons to.
I enjoy all illustrations of LOTR & The Silmarillion from BEFORE the Jackson trilogy. I love the film adaptation but one could say that it's been _too_ influential in shaping the portrayal of Tolkien's characters and world.
Especially to people born after the movies came out.
The Soviet illustrations remind me of Samuri Jack.
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.
lenerdenator 3 hours ago [-]
Might not be a coincidence. Samurai Jack's creator, Genndy Tartakovsky, was born in 1970 in Soviet Moscow. Non-zero chance he might have seen this right as he was getting into drawing.
Ar-Curunir 5 hours ago [-]
To me it feels exactly the right tone for a children’s book (which it is!)
I still have this book! my mom reading this to me and my brother was my introduction to Tolkien.. very nostalgic.
us-merul 4 days ago [-]
I found this starting with the recent XKCD comic about Tom Bombadil in LOTR, seeing he appeared in a 1991 Soviet TV adaptation that’s now on YouTube, checking here if anyone had posted it, and someone had provided the link to this book in that thread. Really cool find.
bubblebeard 6 hours ago [-]
Gotta love that spaghetti Golum, this is truly great stuff.
blacklion 4 hours ago [-]
It was my first book by JRRT.
Gualdrapo 11 hours ago [-]
They're really amazing. Thank you
curioser 10 hours ago [-]
I wonder if there are other sites that show the custom illustrations for the German, French, Spanish, and Japanese translations of JRRT’s books?
mbeex 10 hours ago [-]
Google Search for an edition from Eastern Germany. Read it, when I was 10 years old (50 years ago!). It was long before all the fantasy hype, and it was magical. Klaus Ensikat was the illustrator.
"Notice, comrades, how evil dragon sits on hoarded wealth."
alexalx666 7 hours ago [-]
no they are not brilliant, there were much better ones in Albrecht Durer style
9 hours ago [-]
ConanRus 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
geldedus 5 hours ago [-]
Brilliant? To me they are rather naive, childish
flohofwoe 5 hours ago [-]
Which makes a lot of sense sense since The Hobbit is a children's book.
3 hours ago [-]
rightbyte 10 hours ago [-]
It feels like the illustrator didn't read the book? The stone trolls are giants? (Am I missremembering that they were trolls?) And the battle is between two human armies. Surely goblins were described in Bilbo as not human barbarians?
bee_rider 9 hours ago [-]
They seemed a bit big to me too. Although I’m not sure to what extent that’s colored by modern interpretations.
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).
KineticLensman 9 hours ago [-]
There are very few descriptions of trolls in TLOTR. The troll that the Fellowship encounter in Moria has "a huge arm ... with a dark skin of greenish scales [and] a great, flat toeless foot". The mountain trolls who are intended to wield Grond in the siege of Minas Tirith aren't described at all.
None of them are anything like the vaguely comedic trolls in The Hobbit.
bee_rider 9 hours ago [-]
Interesting! I’d forgotten and, I think, entirely substituted in the movie version.
sevensor 10 hours ago [-]
I thought the trolls were perfect. Big, unkempt, medium drunk. They should be a great deal bigger than Bilbo.
rightbyte 9 hours ago [-]
Ye reading some background it is the classical view of trolls as like big humans?
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.
tokai 7 hours ago [-]
Trolls, like Jotun, can be both monstrous or humanlike. In Scandinavian folklore a troll is more of a broad category than a specific 'species'. The main thing is that they are malevolent and supernatural. Some trolls are grotesque creatures with a dozen heads, while others are so human like that they can exchange their children for human children without the human parents ever realizing. Following is from a Danish historic dictionary:
«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)»
sevensor 7 hours ago [-]
Just from reading the text itself. I’m well familiar with the D&D troll, but Tolkien’s trolls are just big ruffians covered in mutton grease.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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...
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
https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/archives/03gGWt8x1MUJt...
Especially to people born after the movies came out.
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.
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.
https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=ensikat+illustration+h...
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.
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)»