Adaptations of The Hobbit

March 1953 saw the first authorized adaptation of the book The Hobbit, a stage production by St. Margaret's School, Edinburgh.^[1] The Hobbit has since been adapted for other media many times including adaptations for stage, screen, radio, and gaming, both board and video games.

Several of these adaptations have received critical recognition of their own, including a video game that won the Golden Joystick Award, a scenario of a war game that won an Origins Award, and an animated picture nominated for a Hugo Award.

Dramatizations

The following is a list of dramatizations of The Hobbit.

• The 1966 short animated film The Hobbit! directed by Gene Deitch was the first ever film production of The Hobbit. American film producer William L. Snyder obtained the rights to the novel from the Tolkien estate very cheaply while it was still largely unknown, with the proviso that he produce a "full-colour film" by 30 June 1966, and immediately set about producing a feature length film, with screenplay by Deitch. The project fell through, but after the explosion in the novel's popularity, Snyder realized that his contract had not required the film to be of any length: he therefore instructed Deitch to create a 12-minute film based on his earlier work so that he could retain his rights. He later sold the rights for around $100,000 (not adjusted for inflation).^[2][3][4]

• The BBC Radio 4 series The Hobbit radio drama was an adaptation by Michael Kilgarriff, broadcast in eight parts (four total hours) from September to November 1968. It starred Anthony Jackson as narrator, Paul Daneman as Bilbo and Heron Carvic as Gandalf. The series was released on audio cassette in 1988 and on CD in 1997.^[5]
• In 1968, J. R. R. Tolkien authorized Patricia Gray's adaptation for the stage. This dramatization makes changes to the original plot, removing sections and giving Thorin the role of dragon-slayer, amongst other deviations.^[6] Many productions of this version have been performed up to the present day.
• In 1972, The Hobbit: A Musical was published by Dramatic Publishing. The book is by Ruth Perry, the music is by Allan Jay Friedman, and the lyrics are by David Rogers.^[7][8]
• Nicol Williamson played over twenty different characters, each with a unique voice, in an adaptation directed by Harely Usill. This performance was released on four LP records in 1974 by Argo Records.
  

  

  Cover of the cassette edition of Nicol Williamson's dramatization of The Hobbit featuring the illustration Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raftelves by J. R. R. Tolkien
• The Hobbit, an animated version of the story produced by Rankin/Bass, debuted as a television movie in the United States in 1977. In 1978, Romeo Muller won a Peabody Award for his teleplay for The Hobbit. The film was also nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, but lost to Star Wars.^[9]
• The American radio theatre company The Mind's Eye produced an audio adaptation of The Hobbit which was released on six one-hour audio cassettes in 1979.^[5]
• The BBC children's television series Jackanory presented an adaptation of The Hobbit in 1979.^[10] Unusually for the programme, the adaptation was narrated by several people. According to David Wood, one of the narrators, the release of the production on video has been repeatedly stopped by the Tolkien Estate.^[11]
• A Soviet 1985 television play "The adventure of the Hobbit" (Приключение Хоббита).^{[12][dead link]}
• Robert Inglis adapted and performed a one-man theatre play of The Hobbit.^[13] This performance led to him being asked to record the unabridged audiobook for The Lord of the Rings in 1990 and, a year later, he read the unabridged version of The Hobbit.^[14]
• A Finnish live action television miniseries Hobitit was broadcast in 1993 based on the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
• The Manitoba Theatre for Young People commissioned Kim Selody to adapt The Hobbit; his version premiered there in 1999. The play is only licensed to be performed in Canada.^[15] Various productions have been reviewed as being "whimsical, wild and not too scary"^[16] and "not really that exciting".^[17]
• A live-action film version was announced on 18 December 2007, to be co-produced by MGM and New Line Cinema, and produced by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson.^[18] Guillermo Del Toro was originally signed on to direct both parts but withdrew from the project in May 2010, leaving Jackson as director.^[19] The narrative of the film is to be expanded and split over two parts. It was announced on 22 October 2010, after months of speculation, that Martin Freeman will be playing Bilbo Baggins.^[20] The casting had been uncertain due to the unexpected success of the summer BBC adaptation of Sherlock and Freeman's subsequent filming commitments for the second series. Filming began on 21 March 2011.^[21] The adaptation will include a new character that did not appear in the original book, Tauriel, who is the head of the Elven guard, and played by Evangeline Lilly.^[22]

Graphic media

A fifteen-part adaptation of The Hobbit was published as a "visual serial" in Fleetway Publications' Princess and Girl magazine in the United Kingdom. The story was published on a weekly basis between 10 October 1964 and 16 January 1965, accompanied by five or six illustrations by Ferguson Dewar.^[23]

Gollum in The Hobbit comic adaptation (1989). Art by David Wenzel.

A three-part comic book adaptation with script by Chuck Dixon and Sean Deming and illustrated by David Wenzel was published by Eclipse Comics in 1989. In 1990 a one-volume edition was released by Unwin Paperbacks. The cover was artwork by the original illustrator David Wenzel. A reprint collected in one volume was released by Del Rey Books in 2001. Its cover, illustrated by Donato Giancola, was awarded the Association of Science Fiction Artists Award for Best Cover Illustration in 2002.^[24]

A commemorative postage stamp, illustrated by Peter Malone, was issued in 1998 by the Royal Mail of Great Britain in a series entitled Magical Worlds: Fantasy Books for Children.^[25]

Music

Paul Corfield Godfrey, who has written a large amount of music based on Tolkien with the permission of the Tolkien Estate and HarperCollins Publishers, wrote a full-length opera on The Hobbit during the years 1971-76. The work divides into two parts entitled 'Over Hill and Under Hill' and 'Fire and Water' but the score of the second part only survives in fragments. Two orchestral suites were extracted from the work and the first of these was performed in London in 1971.

Leonard Nimoy sang a jaunty ditty about The Hobbit titled The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins. The recording originally appeared on the album The Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy, released in 1968. A music video to accompany it, featuring sand-dunes and dancing girls, was also produced.^[26]

In 2001, Marjo Kuusela produced a ballet Hobitti (The Hobbit in Finnish) with music by Aulis Sallinen for the Finnish National Opera.^[27]

Dean Burry was commissioned by the Canadian Children's Opera Chorus to write an operatic version of the story for piano and choir to be performed in 2004.^[28] The performance rights were subsequently locked up by Tolkien Enterprises before being released in 2006. The Sarasota Youth Opera of the Sarasota Opera then requested full orchestration. With that and some revisions by the composer, the second version premiered on 9 and 10 May 2008 in the United States and was conducted by Lance Inouye.^[29]

German power metal band Blind Guardian have recorded many songs which contain either tributes or references to the works of Tolkien. On their 1992 album, Somewhere Far Beyond, the song "The Bard's Song - The Hobbit" tells part of the story of The Hobbit.^{[citation needed]}

Board, war and role-playing games

The Hobbit has been the subject of several board games.

TSR, Inc. has released two editions of a war game based on The Battle of Five Armies, designed by Larry Smith in the 1970s using cardboard tokens and a map of the area around the Lonely Mountain as the setting. The game was criticized for a lack of clearness in the rules, and praised for evoking the onslaught of the Warg and goblin army.^[30]

The Lonely Mountain, produced in 1985 by Iron Crown Enterprises,^[31] was designed by Coleman Charlton and features groups of adventurers entering Smaug's Lair to capture his treasure before he awakens. The same year, the same publisher also released its version of The Battle of Five Armies,^[31] developed by Richard H. Britton, Coleman Charlton, and John Crowell, again taking the theme of a war game and using card counters and a paper map.

The Hobbit Adventure Boardgame [sic] was the last game from Iron Crown based directly on The Hobbit. They continued to publish the Middle-earth Role Playing Game, a game licensed on both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings properties, combining elements from both works.^[32]

Middle-earth Strategic Gaming (formerly Middle-earth Play-by-Mail), which has won several Origin Awards, uses the Battle of Five Armies as an introductory scenario to the full game and includes characters and armies from the book.^[33]

In 2005, Games Workshop released a Battle of Five Armies tabletop wargame, designed by Rick Priestley using highly detailed 10-millimetre figures sculpted by Mark Harrison, based on Games Workshop's Warmaster rules and designed to be played in a small space suitable for the home gamer.^[34][35]

Video games

Several computer and video games, both licensed and unlicensed, have been based on the story. One of the most successful was The Hobbit, an award-winning computer game developed in 1982 by Beam Software and published by Melbourne House with compatibility for most computers available at the time. A copy of the novel was included in each game package in order to encourage players to engage the text, since ideas for gameplay could be found therein.^[36] Likewise, it can be seen that the game is not attempting to re-tell the story, but rather sits along-side it, using the narrative to both structure and motivate gameplay.^[37] The game won the Golden Joystick Award for Strategy Game of the Year in 1983^[38] and was responsible for popularizing the phrase, "Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold."^[39]

Sierra Entertainment published a platform game with action-RPG elements titled The Hobbit in 2003 for Windows PCs, PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Nintendo GameCube.^[40] A version, based on the same character design and story, but using a 2D isometric platform and using 3D characters which were pre-rendered using models from the console version, was also published for the Game Boy Advance.^[41]

References