[aleyan]

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]

> 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.

[ViktorRay]

What do you mean? This seems accurate to how Gollum was depicted in the Peter Jackson movies.

Do you mean the skin color? The reference to the color black here is clearly there because Gollum is in the shadows in a darkened cave.

[Tallain]

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.