I have some strong associations between the holiday season and Tolkien. This predates the Christmas releases of the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy, though that wound up reinforcing them. Mainly, I got a lot of Tolkien and MERP books as gifts over the years and spent late December and early January reading them. But one of my favorite memories is of one glorious Friday after Thanksgiving when one of our local TV stations ran the Rankin/Bass Hobbit, followed by Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings and the Rankin/Bass Return of the King (and finished the day out with March of the Wooden Soldiers for good measure). That was a day of pure magic in front of the TV.

When I was a kid, I didn’t care about the goofy songs in the Rankin/Bass cartoons, there were dragons and orcs and the Mouth of Sauron, so it was COOL. As I got older, I kind of looked down my nose at them in favor of Bakshi’s film. Jackson blew them all out of the water, but I’ve since soured on those films and have rediscovered a fondness for Rankin/Bass. I should note that whatever my opinion at the moment, I have spent most of my life with the Orc marching song “Where There’s a Whip, There’s a Way” stuck in my head (if you want it stuck in yours…)

Anyway, this is a 1978 edition of The Hobbit illustrated with stills and production drawings from the Rankin/Bass film. I snagged it recently from Second Time Books (swell folks!) on a lark and I wasn’t disappointed. I haven’t seen the film in a long, long time, so flipping through the illustrations was kind of like seeing it for the first time again.

Lots to love here – the Great Goblin model sheet, Smaug’s lambent eyes – but my fave is the stony face watching Bilbo and Gollum tell riddles in the dark.