Friday 22 September 2017

Bilbo Baggins

It's Bilbo Baggins' birthday! September 22nd is the date the hobbit celebrates his birthday, and as mentioned in yesterday's post he is 80 years old - in publishing terms that is. It's also the autumn equinox today, I wonder if Tolkien chose the date for this reason?

I only have one Bilbo in my miniatures collection, which I hastily painted up today! I had to mark the day somehow. For colours, I copied those from the movie. It's a very small mini, so I skipped some of the teeniest details. It's quite lacklustre if I'm honest, reflecting the way I feel today having come down with a cold :(

To properly celebrate this day, I spent some time browsing fellow painters' work on the little chap, and present a selection below. Each has a link to the original source, if any of the owners/painters object to me using their image just let me know in the comments and I will remove it.










I have also been scouring the web for other renditions of Mr Baggins. It's interesting to see how he has been portrayed down the decades. For a thorough examination of early artistic renditions, I can recommend you browse the PowerOfBabel blog, there are a number of posts showing various printed illustrations.

Of course, there are also plenty of more modern renditions too. I have deliberately excluded art based on the movies, I'm sure you all know how Martin Freeman looks by now. Again, the list below contains a link to the original source, if there are any objections to their use please let me know.










And finally, an image that does not contain Mr Baggins as such but is instantly recognisable as a scene from the book. After the multi-coloured marvels of all the previous renditions, there's something rather beautiful in these simple lines, from the Folio Society version of the book.


3 comments:

Michal DwarfCrypt said...

Fantastic entry! Thank You so much!

Phil said...

Excellent post about Bilbo!

Matt Crump said...

John Howe always does it for me.....thank heavens they got him involved in the films

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