"I have the map and the key to the mountain that was used in the film in a frame," he notes. "And I have Thorin's sword and his oaken shield. It's on my bookshelf!"

Eleven years ago, Tolkienites rejoiced as The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey landed in UK cinemas. With Lord of the Rings director, Peter Jackson, at the helm, a legion of actors including Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett, and Orlando Bloom signed on to star.

Joining them, British actor Richard Armitage won the role of Thorin Oakenshield – the legendary King of Durin's folk. Determined to reclaim the Lonely Mountain from Smaug, and secure the coveted Arkenstone, Thorin's redemptive story of greed made him one of the most interesting characters in the trilogy.

Reflecting on The Hobbit's enduring legacy and the profound effect that the franchise had on him, Richard, 52, spoke exclusively to HELLO! about his time on set.

On why the role of Thorin was so special to him, Richard explained: "It had an impact on me because I think The Hobbit was one of the first books I ever read where I really allowed my imagination to engage.

"I was completely absorbed by Tolkien. Then I found Lord of the Rings and I think it was where my early feelers were going towards being an actor, but I didn't realise it at the time," he continued.

"So, when I came to playing Thorin Oakenshield as a 40-year-old, I was retracing my steps right back to being an eight-year-old in school and finding that book for the first time. So, it was just such a massive thing for me."

As for his time on set, Richard revealed a particularly poignant memory from day one of production.

"One of the fondest memories I had was on the very first day of shooting when Peter Jackson blessed his new sound stage with a Māori Haka. I had to speak Māori to the crew because they saw my character as the King of the Dwarves," he tells HELLO!.

"And so they asked me to make this speech in Māori and the door was lifted and the sun was rising across the floor and it was incredibly moving. It was a really special moment."

After wrapping the trilogy with The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014), Richard was able to take home a number of his most treasured possessions from the set, which he continues to cherish.

"I have the map and the key to the mountain that was used in the film in a frame," he notes. "And I have Thorin's sword and his oaken shield. It's on my bookshelf!"

After the success of the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Tolkeinites have since entered the Rings of Power era, following the release of Amazon Prime's high fantasy series in 2022.

With the show renewed for a second season, naturally, we had to ask if Richard would be interested in a role of some sort. "I mean, I would love to, but I think it's very hard to do that. I'd have to be a different character because you couldn't bring Peter Jackson's version of Thorin Oakenshield into somebody else's. But I love the story," he said.

Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman starred in the Harry Potter movie series as Sirius Black, and the actor credits the role with making him a better father. But Oldman didn't love everything about the Harry Potter series. On the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Oldman said his performance in the films was "mediocre."

"I think my work is mediocre in it," Oldman said. "No, I do. Maybe if I had read the books like Alan [Rickman], if I had got ahead of the curve, if I had known what's coming, I honestly think I would have played it differently."

"It's like anything, if I sat and watched myself in something and said, 'My god, I'm amazing,' that would be a very sad day, because you want to make the next thing better," he said.

Also during the interview, Oldman revealed what he thought was the hardest scene to film in the Harry Potter series. He said this was the scene in Prisoner of Azkaban when he's lying by a frozen lake, with his soul leaving his body. Oldman said this took about a week to film, and all the time, he was just lying down and getting very cold and uncomfortable. "The hardest thing I had to do was lie next to a frozen lake," he said.

Interview on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAO2y3kqkl0

I was binge-watching the DVDs with my wife, Sarah, when it hit me: Middle-earth does exist, and I don’t need a portal. I can fly there in 23 hours. I turned to Sarah and said, “Shall we move to New Zealand?” One of the many things I love about my wife is that she listens to my madder ideas with a careful seriousness. Six months later we were in Auckland.

This has strong Bilbo Baggins vibes lol.

What The Hobbit Animated Movie Did Better Than the Peter Jackson Trilogy

The animated adaptations of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings from the 1970s and 1980s have a bit of a bad reputation these days, but these are not entirely deserved. In particular, Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass’ 1977 TV movie of The Hobbit, with a screenplay by Romeo Miller, gets a lot of things right that Peter Jackson’s three-part live-action film adaptation did not.

The most obvious advantage that the animated version has over the live-action films is its length. The fact that the live-action movies are too long is pretty well-established, but by way of a reminder, the book of The Hobbit is about 300 pages long, with slight variations in each edition. Other books of similar length that have been adapted into films include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Emma Donoghue’s Room, John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. One thing all of these have in common, is that they were adapted into one single film, two to three hours long. Pride and Prejudice has also been adapted into a six-hour miniseries by the BBC, but none of them have been stretched out to just under eight hours, which is the combined length of the theatrical cuts of the three live-action Hobbit movies. (They’re just under nine hours if you are watching the extended editions though.)

The Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit, on the other hand, is a mere one hour and 17 minutes, which you could almost argue is actually too short. The introductions of Elrond—who has an inexplicable crown of stars around his head for no apparent reason—and Beorn, for example, could have done with a little more room to breathe. But for a fairly slight story, a runtime that is a little too short feels like an improvement on a runtime that is far too long.

One thing both versions “get right,” that is, they do it really well, is the music, but the Rankin/Bass film uses music in a different way to the live-action movies. In Jackson’s 2012 film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Howard Shore’s “Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold,” performed by Richard Armitage and the other dwarves in an incredibly evocative basso profundo voice, is a thing of beauty. The Rankin/Bass The Hobbit also features a musical setting for the same song from the book, and although it lacks the power of that incredible bass voice, it’s a good piece of music in its own right.

But the Rankin/Bass movie doesn’t stop there; it’s actually a musical with relatively short songs being peppered throughout the story. This is a completely valid choice too. Author J.R.R. Tolkien’s books are full of songs, and nearly all of the songs that appear in the film are samplings of Tolkien’s own songs from the book using his lyrics. The only exception is the theme song, “The Greatest Adventure,” which is a complete original.

Making the film as a musical also fits with the overall tone viewers would have expected from Rankin/Bass. The studio was known for its holiday specials—made-for-television, animated or stop-motion films that usually aired around Christmas time. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) and Frosty the Snowman (1969) had already become holiday staples by the time of The Hobbit. Both heavily featured music and songs, and Rudolph was a musical feature with several different songs included throughout the story. A musical with short songs appearing frequently is something audiences would expect from the Rankin and Bass studio. And they also expected the studio to produce animations aimed at a “family” audience, primarily children. This is the biggest thing Rankin and Bass got right and that the Jackson movies get wrong: The Hobbit is a story for children.

When Tolkien originally imagined The Hobbit in the 1930s, it was as a story for his own children, and was not originally connected to the wider mythology of Middle-earth. It was only as time went on that the story got drawn into his bigger mythmaking project. And while The Lord of the Rings is clearly a novel aimed at an adult readership, The Hobbit is equally clearly intended for a younger audience. Bookshops these days generally shelve it with Middle Grade fiction aimed at children aged roughly eight to 12, not far from Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis and his Narnia books (which Tolkien did not like, and probably would not appreciate seeing next to his own work!).

In fairness to Peter Jackson, Tolkien did come to regret the tone and style of The Hobbit. This was partly because it made it stick out like a sore thumb next to his other writing about Middle-earth, but also because Tolkien came to believe passionately that children should not be talked (or written) down to, and that children’s literature did not require some kind of special, slightly silly tone. In a letter to W. H. Auden in 1955, Tolkien said of The Hobbit: “It was unhappily really meant, as far as I was conscious, as a ‘children’s story’, and as I had not learned sense then… it has some of the sillinesses of manner caught unthinkingly from the kind of stuff I had had served to me… I deeply regret them. So do intelligent children.”

There’s an argument to be made, therefore, that The Hobbit should be transformed into something with a darker, more adult tone in an adaptation. Jackson probably felt he had little choice in the matter anyway since his live-action Hobbit movies were prequels to his live-action The Lord of the Rings movies—and those, as is appropriate to The Lord of the Rings, have a tone of high epic fantasy with an intended audience of adults and older teenagers.

But Tolkien regretted the tone and style of The Hobbit, not because he regretted writing it for children, but because he felt that writing for children should not engage in “sillinesses of manner.” It is still a story intended primarily for children, and while of course film adaptations have to make changes, the Rankin and Bass film feels more like it captures the spirit of The Hobbit because it is aimed primarily at children. There are no lewd jokes, the scary sequences are kept at an appropriate level, and of course, the runtime will not test the patience of elementary school aged children too much.

One of the main ways Rankin and Bass make it clear that this is a film intended for children and their families is by deliberately echoing aspects of Disney’s animated films. The decision to make the film a musical is one obvious similarity with Disney’s animated fairy tales, but there are others as well. The similarity in the character design of the dwarves in The Hobbit to the dwarfs from Disney’s 1937 classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is not a coincidence. (By the way, if anyone is wondering, Tolkien was quite particular about the fact that his imaginary creatures were dwarves, as opposed to dwarfs. In his Author’s Note at the beginning of The Hobbit, Tolkien explained that “in English the only correct plural of dwarf is dwarfs, and the adjective is dwarfish. In this story dwarves and dwarvish are used, but only when speaking of the ancient people to whom Thorin Oakenshield and his companions belonged.”)

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To cement the Disney-like feel, the film opens on an image of a big, hard-bound and illustrated book, just like Disney’s Snow White, Pinocchio (1940), Cinderella (1950), Sleeping Beauty (1959), The Sword in the Stone (1963), The Jungle Book (1967), and Robin Hood (1973). Interestingly, Rankin/Bass’ The Hobbit opens on an image of the book, by J.R.R. Tolkien, with the author and the famous first line (“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”) clearly visible. The end of the movie, on the other hand, shows Bilbo’s in-universe Red Book, titled There and Back Again: A Hobbit’s Holiday, before finishing on an image of the One Ring, glinting in a glass case on Bilbo’s mantelpiece. Both clearly parallel the Disney trope, especially the opening, which places the story firmly in a fictional, “fairtytale” universe.

There are of course some things the Jackson movies got right that the Rankin/Bass version did not. One of the more inexplicable decisions made for the animated movie was to increase the body count of named characters in the climactic Battle of the Five Armies. In Tolkien’s novel, and in Jackson’s film, the only three members of the Company to die are Thorin, Kili, and Fili. Rankin and Bass, however, kill off seven of the Dwarves, only even naming Thorin and Bombur, both of whom die on screen. We can assume that Kili and Fili were among the seven killed and that Balin survived (since he has to go and die in Moria sometime between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings), but it is a mystifying decision, especially since films aimed at children do not usually increase the body count.

The Jackson movies also include some fantastic sequences that, taken on their own, are perfect screen adaptations of scenes from the book. Bilbo’s riddle-game in the dark with Gollum under the Misty Mountains in An Unexpected Journey and his verbal sparring with Smaug in The Desolation of Smaug are near perfect, helped by fantastic performances from Martin Freeman as Bilbo, Andy Serkis as Gollum, and Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug. The casting is all around pretty perfect, especially Freeman, and while Legolas’ added storyline was controversial, the character really is supposed to be the son of Thranduil, the King of Mirkwood, and it’s rather nice to see him slotted in there, even if the role he is given is not to everyone’s taste.

Overall though, the Rankin/Bass animated adaptation of The Hobbit, whatever its flaws, feels like it captures a bit more of the feel of the book, even if it leans quite heavily toward a more Disney-like tone. And if you have young children, you are almost certainly better off trying to show them this version instead of the live-action films. That is if you are too impatient to wait until they are old enough to read the book!

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/12865151

Witch-hunting in 17th-century Scotland was so well paid that it attracted some blatant fakers – Susan Morrison

A witch-hunter nicknamed ‘The Bloody Juglar’ appears to have used a retractable needle to prick his victims without drawing blood, while another responsible for the deaths of many innocent women turned out to be a woman herself

At Spynie Palace in 1662, John Innes of Leuchars had a serious problem on his hands. Local people were complaining to him about milkless cows, shrivelling crops and dying children. Pretty obvious that a witch was on the loose. As the local law enforcement thereabouts, John was expected to do something, but witch-hunting was not in Mr Innes’s skill set.

It must have been a relief when a slight young man almost magically appeared in front of him: John Dickson’s the name, and witch-hunting’s the game. Bags of experience. Happy to sort the problem out. Possibly dropped the name of superstar witch-hunter John Kincaid into the conversation, a Tranent man with a fearsome reputation as Scotland's most fearsome witch pricker or ‘brodder’.

The Scots didn't do witch-ducking. We went for the needle. The Devil gave his followers marks somewhere on their bodies. Where the Devil left his mark, there would be no blood, and no pain. Kincaid and his like would use the needle to ‘prick’ the accused. The words prick and needle are misleading. This needle was no dainty thing to be lost easily in a haystack. These were more like hefty great crochet hooks. The ‘pricking’ was more of a violent slam into the body.

The mark could be anywhere. The accused were stripped and shaved, and the needle plunged in. Some victims didn’t move, scream or bleed – the mark had been found. Possibly they couldn’t move. They may have been in deep shock. These were pious times.

Women rarely left home without covering their heads, now they stood publicly naked, shaved and exhausted. There may well have been little or no bleeding, if the needle hit a part of the body with a poor blood supply. Or perhaps the needle was retractable.

There are clues to such trickery. In the late 17th century, a witch-hunter nicknamed “The Bloody Juglar” turned up in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Pretty quickly his trusty needle pricked a victim and drew no blood. A witch, ready for trial and execution. Hold up, said Colonel Fenwick, the town’s military governor. He called in the mayor and the magistrates. He was worried that this evidence was falsely procured. He had his suspicions about that needle.

Why not get The Bloody Juglar to do the pricking again, but with a council-provided needle? Our boy baulked – “by no means would he be induced unto”. To the good people of Berwick, this “was a sufficient Discovery of Knavery”. The Juglar was busted.

John Kincaid may have been a knave, but between 1649 and 1662 he rampaged freely. It was lucrative. He pocketed £6 for a discovery of a witch at Burntcastle estate. They chucked in another £3 to cover the booze bill for him and his manservant.

The year 1659 was a busy one. Kincaid seems to have pricked profitably in East Lothian, where 18 accused witches were executed. In 1661, Forfar was so chuffed with his efforts that they gave him the freedom of the burgh.

Perhaps young John Dickson was inspired by Kincaid. Seemed a good trade for a lad, finding God's enemies and being very well paid for it, too. John headed north, fetched up at Spynie Palace and appeared before the harassed Innes, who wasted no time in signing up his new witch-hunter to an exclusive contract.

John was on a good retainer with performance-related bonuses, six shillings a day expenses plus £6 per witch caught. In no time at all, our man on the make had two servants and a very fancy horse. He was on-call and carried out witch-pricking in Elgin, Forres, Inverness and Tain. He possibly pricked Isobel Goudie, Scotland’s most famous witch.

He had a particular take on the procedure. Folk called him the Pricker “because of his use of a long brasse pin”. He had his victims stripped naked, then the “spell spot was seen and discovered. After rubbing over the whole body with his palms.” In a vicious witch-hunt/clan war in Wardlaw on the banks of Loch Ness, 14 women and one man were treated so savagely under John’s direct supervision that some of them died.

Our boy was on a roll, until he did something stupid. He pricked a man named John Hay, a former messenger to the Privy Council. Now, this was not a man to mess with. He had connections. He wrote to Edinburgh complaining in an incredibly civil servant manner, denouncing the witch-pricker who worked on his case as a “cheating fellow” who carried out the torture without a licence. Even witch-hunters need the correct paperwork.

The Privy Council in Edinburgh agreed. They called the maverick Mr Dickson in for a word. And they made a terrible discovery: John Dickson was a woman. Her name was Christian Caddell, and she came from Fife. Oh, she could tell a witch, no doubt about it. She claimed she spotted them by looking into their eyes and seeing an upside-down cross.

Of course, this was not the scientifically accepted manner of witch-finding. A needle must be used. And, obviously, you needed to be a man.

Christian stood trial, not for fake witch hunting, torturing or even for those murderous deaths, but for wearing men’s clothing. She was sentenced to transportation, and on May 6 she sailed from the port of Leith on the ship Mary, bound for Barbados.

On the day she left Scotland, Isobel Elder and Isabel Simson, pricked by John Dickson, aka Christian Caddel, were burned in Forres. Just because you were discovered to be a witch in the wrong way didn’t mean to say you were innocent. They were the last two victims of the cross-dressing counterfeit witch-pricker.

“Eucatastrophe”: Tolkien on the secret to a good fairy tale

• For J.R.R. Tolkien, the single most important element of a fairy tale was the dramatic reversal of misfortune in the story's ending. *

Key Takeaways

• In Greek mythology, the story of Pandora's box comes in (at least) two versions. In one, hope is released as the final evil in the world. In another, hope is the only consolation and weapon we have.
• J.R.R. Tolkien coined the word “eucatastrophe” to describe a hallmark of good fairy tales: Good people win out despite the odds. Hope, in other words, is a vital story component.
• For Tolkien and the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, hope is the most important disposition we can possess. Without it, the darkness of the world will win out.

There are at least two versions of the story of Pandora’s box. In the classic version from the Greek poet Hesiod, when Pandora’s curiosity got the better of her, she unleashed into the world all sorts of evils: sickness, famine, death, and people who ask questions at the end of a meeting. When Pandora finally closed the jar, she left only one “evil” inside: hope. For Hesiod, there’s nothing so cruel as hope. Hope is what forces us to carry on building, fixing, and loving when the world offers only destruction, chaos, and heartbreak. It’s what gets us off the ground only to be punched back down. Hope is the naivety of a fool. As Friedrich Nietzsche put it, “Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

Another variation of the Pandora’s box story is a Greek fable called “Zeus and the Jar of Good Things.” In this account, everything is inverted. The jar does not contain misery but good things. When “mankind” (there’s no Pandora in this version) opened the jar, they let out and lost all these good things: the things that would have made life a paradise. When the lid was closed, there was only one divine blessing left: “Hope alone is still found among the people.”

The author J.R.R. Tolkien and the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel would likely prefer the second version. After all, they considered hope to be perhaps the most important part of being human.

The eucatastrophe

Kurt Vonnegut is famous for writing novels like Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle. In storytelling circles, he’s famous for his “shapes of stories.” These were eight diagrams that define the traditional arcs of common stories, like “Boy Meets Girl” or “From Bad to Worse.” His arc about fairy tales goes like this: Things start badly and then get a bit better. But then there’s a catastrophe that brings everything to ruin. The story ends with a drastic upheaval in fortunes — a transformation and magical finale — and everyone lives happily ever after.

Tolkien, were he alive, would agree. For him, the single most important element of a fairy tale is this final dramatic reversal of misfortune. He coined the word “eucatastrophe” to describe it. “The consolation of fairy-stories [is] the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn,'” Tolkien wrote. The Lord of the Rings does not end with the hobbits dead and Sauron cackling over his orcish, industrial empire. It ends with light beating dark — with simple kindness, love, and companionship winning out over evil.

Lifting the heart

Tolkien is very careful to make the point that this is not some form of escapism. It’s not quixotic wish fulfillment. It does not pretend the world is an endlessly happy idyll of singing dwarves and affable wizards. The world has great suffering and misery, and there are plenty of nightmares to be found. The eucatastrophe, though, is “the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat.”

The purpose of a good fairy story is not to hide the shadows of the world. The original Grimms’ Fairy Tales (not the sanitized Disney versions) were full of infanticide, cannibalism, and horror. The mark of a good fairy story, Tolkien wrote, “…[is that] however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears.”

Hope is all we have

The religious undertones here are not accidental. Tolkien was a Catholic who was fond of the redemption and grace found in the narratives of the Bible. Marcel did not, as far as we know, read Tolkien, but his own philosophy of hope bears striking similarities.

What Tolkien describes as the eucatastrophe, or final deliverance, Marcel called hope. For Marcel, “Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories, and all calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me.”

Hope is the belief in an order to the Universe — an order where everything will turn out well enough. It is a kind of faith that simply refuses to accept that things are broken, or that misery, suffering, and death are all that exist. Marcel was a Christian, but his account of hope can apply to anyone. The hopeful of the world are those who see the Universe as being on their side. Set against “all experience, all probability, all statistics,” they see that a “given order shall be re-established.” Hope is not a wish. It is not optimism or naivety. It is an assertion. It is telling the world, “No, this is not the way things will be; things will be better.” For both Marcel and Tolkien, it is only with hope that we banish despair.

You do not haggle with or beg the darkness. Like a blazing torch, you must shine hope brightly and fiercely.

But some people don't have the privilege of having hope. Some sit in the dark waiting for bombs and white phosphorus to fall on them, burn them and die as the world watches a genocide occur on live television. I pray for the people of Gaza, none of whom are human animals, for their existence.

A new report claims the apology posted for Lord of the Rings: Gollum was written using ChatGPT without the dev team's consent.

• The Lord of the Rings: Gollum game received a negative response due to technical problems, derivative gameplay, uninteresting narrative, and poor graphics.
• The apology posted by Nacon was generated by an AI-powered text generator, ChatGPT, without the knowledge of the developer, Daedalic Entertainment.
• The game's troubled development was attributed to a lack of funds and time, leading to downscaled features and a rushed release.

According to a recent report, Daedalic Entertainment, the developer behind the infamous The Lord of the Rings: Gollum game, has claimed that the apology was generated by the AI-powered text generator, ChatGPT. This report also states the developers had no knowledge of this apology being written and that it was a decision from its publisher, Nacon. Alongside that, Daedelic Entertainment employees also went into detail about what had gone wrong with Lord of the Rings: Gollum during development.

Earlier this year, the licensed game had launched to a rather overwhelming negative response, evident with how Lord of the Rings: Gollum became one of the lowest-rated games of 2023. Several critics and fans have cited the game's technical problems being the biggest factors to this negative reception, compounded by the gameplay that many found to be derivative and uninteresting. The graphics weren't a big selling point either, nor was its narrative compelling to many. As such, the game failed to deliver on all fronts to many people, with gamers walking away unimpressed with the big licensed game. The developers have recently spoken up about its troubled development and the source of the struggles the team faced.

Anonymous employees from Daedalic Entertainment were interviewed by German gaming outlet GameTwo, with some discussing the relationship between the developers and its publisher, Nacon. One thing that was brought up was the apology regarding Gollum's troubled launch that was posted to the game's official Twitter account. According to Daedalic, this apology was written using the ChatGPT software, to which the developer had no knowledge of it being written or its content prior to its publication, claiming it was all handled by Nacon.

My favorit part. This nonpology from Nacon was written with ChatGPT. pic.twitter.com/N0ZtX2I6WZ — Knoebel (@Knoebelbroet) October 7, 2023

Regarding the apology made for The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, many gamers stated that the revelation of Nacon having used ChatGPT to generate it was the reason why it had seemed noncommittal and disingenuous. The biggest indicator in hindsight of how this apology was written without any oversight was the misspelling of the game's title, addressing it as "The Lord of the Ring: Gollum" in the post.

The average development budget of a AAA game in 2023 is usually around $50-$300 million dollars, with Gollum's budget being a more modest 15 million Euros. This lack of funds and time was a big contributing factor to why the game was released in the state it was, according to a former senior designer. The developers went into how a lot of features had to be downscaled due to this, such as one scene having to be restricted to only seeing Gollum eavesdrop on two major characters since they had no time to animate the characters. With this report, it's possible that more blame could fall on the game's publisher, Nacon, rather than the developers.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S, with a Switch version to come at a later date.

Links:

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/chatgpt-was-used-to-write-gollum-game-apology-its-claimed/

https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/lord-of-the-rings-gollum-apology-reportedly-written-by-chat-gpt-2327768/

How Moomin creator Tove Jansson found her dark side illustrating Tolkien and Carroll

She thought Lewis Carroll was ‘pathological’. Her Gollum was so monstrous that JRR Tolkien amended his book’s text – but copies of Tove Jansson’s illustrated edition of ‘The Hobbit’ fly off shelves even though they remain in the original Finnish. Susie Mesure visits a new exhibition that shows how the brain behind the Moomins turned her vividly macabre eye to transform other classic books

In November 1960, Astrid Lindgren got in touch with Tove Jansson, the creator of the Moomins. Lindgren, who wrote the Swedish children’s classic Pippi Longstocking, was also a publisher – and she begged Jansson to turn her imagination to the works of JRR Tolkien. “Who will comfort Astrid if you don’t agree to the proposal I’m now going to make to you?” Lindgren wrote in a letter, riffing on the title of another of Jansson’s recent picture books, Who Will Comfort Toffle?

In the UK, as in her native Finland, Tove Jansson is, of course, best known for the Moomins, an adventurous family of fantastical creatures who live in a magical valley on the edge of a Finnish archipelago. A Moomin comic strip ran in London’s Evening News from 1954 until 1975, reaching millions of readers across the Commonwealth, and, more recently, the first new animation series about the Moomins for nearly three decades – Moominvalley – brought the white trolls to life for a new, younger generation. Fans range from devotees who grew up on books such as Finn Family Moomintroll or Comet in Moominland, to those with a penchant for collecting Moomin mugs, which Moomin Characters, the family-owned company that looks after Jansson’s legacy, still churns out year after year.

Less is known, however, about the success Jansson, a Finnish icon who died in 2001 aged 86, had illustrating the work of other writers, something a new exhibition in Paris is putting under the spotlight. Houses of Tove explores how Jansson was so much more than a comic strip creator, a job she came to loathe because it kept her from her true passions: painting and writing. The show includes a first edition of The Hobbit, or Bilbo – en hobbits äventyr, as it is known in Swedish, which Jansson jumped at the chance to illustrate for Lindgren. It also features a number of preparatory sketches she made for the commission, which were used in a 1973 Finnish translation: the first edition, featuring a wonderful red dragon hovering above a tiny army scaling jagged peaks, is on display.

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When Britain was gripped by 'fairy mania'

"Fairycore" may be trending on social media today but 100 years ago supernatural sprites were a national obsession. Holly Williams explores fairy fever.

Imagine a fairy. Is the picture that appears in your mind's eye a tiny, pretty, magical figure – a childish wisp with insect-like wings and a dress made of petals?

If so, it's likely you've been influenced by Cicely Mary Barker, the British illustrator who created the Flower Fairies. 2023 marks 100 years since the publication of her first book of poems and pictures, Flower Fairies of the Spring – an anniversary currently being celebrated in an exhibition at the Lady Lever Gallery in Merseyside, UK.

The Flower Fairies' influence has endured: they have never been out of print, and continue to be popular around the world – big in Japan and in Italy, where Gucci released a children's range featuring Barker's prints in 2022. Billie Eilish recently had Flower Fairies tattooed on her hand, while their whimsical, floral aesthetic can be seen in the TikTok "fairycore" trend.

(An exhibition at the Lady Lever Art Gallery explores the Flower Fairies phenomenon, and features pantomime costumes (Credit: Pete Carr))

Barker's delicate watercolours certainly helped cement several tropes we now consider classic – almost essential, in fact – in the iconography of the fairy: they are miniature, sweet and youthful, they are intertwined with plants and the natural world, and they are distinctly twee. Yet her drawings were also "firmly footed in realism" points out Fiona Slattery Clark, curator of the show. "The children were all painted from life [and] her plants and flowers are as realistic as possible." Barker drew children from the nursery school her sister ran in their house in Croydon near London; each was assigned a flower or tree, and Barker's detailed illustrations were botanically accurate – she would source samples from Kew Gardens, says Slattery Clark. Even the petal-like wings and fairy outfits were closely based on plants: an acorn cup becoming a jaunty cap, a harebell becoming a prettily scalloped skirt.

For many hundreds of years, fairies were not necessarily tiny and fey, but grotesque or fierce elemental forces

The Flower Fairies were an immediate hit – but Barker was far from the only artist of her era to find success with fairies. In fact, fairy fever swelled within the United Kingdom for over half a century, reaching something of a peak around the time the Flower Fairies emerged in 1923. Over 350 fairy books were published in the UK between 1920 and 1925, including in Enid Blyton's first fairy foray, a collection of poems called Real Fairies in 1923. Fairy art even had the stamp of royal approval: Queen Mary was a fan of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite's ethereal drawings, and helped popularise them by sending them in postcard form.

Fairies have long been with us – in our imaginations, at least. But for many hundreds of years, they were not necessarily tiny and fey, but grotesque or fierce elemental forces, capable of great darkness. "In 1800, if you thought your child was a fairy it would have been like demonic possession – you would have put that child in the fire to drive out the fairy," points out Alice Sage, a curator and historian.

(Each of Barker's fairies corresponded to a plant, tree or flower – pictured, the Silver Birch Fairy (Credit: Estate of Cicely Mary Barker 1934 Flower Fairies))

Yet within 100 years, the whole conception of fairies completely changed. "Throughout the 19th Century, fairies became increasingly miniaturised, sapped of their power – trapped in the nursery," says Sage. As the Victorian era progressed, they are increasingly associated with childhood; as their popularity grew, they shrank.

But first, fairies became a fashionable subject for Victorian artists, often taking inspiration from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. John Anster Fitzgerald, Edwin Landseer, John Everett Millais, Joseph Noel Paton, Arthur Rackham and even JMW Turner – among many others – painted supernatural sprites from the 1840s onwards. But there was still a sense of otherworldly strangeness in many of their depictions – as seen in the work of Richard Dadd, who made his hyper-intricate fairy paintings while living in a Victorian asylum after killing his father.

Then two wider cultural developments came along that changed fairy reputations forever. One was that "children's literature happened", says Sage. The Victorians promoted the idea of childhood as a time of innocence, requiring its own entertainment. Illustrated children's books really took off from the 1870s, with fairies a staple, and increasingly cutesy, feature. The second was pantomime. "Every Victorian pantomime would have this big spectacle of transformation at the end, where children dressed as fairies filled the stage," says Sage. The standard fairy fancy dress outfit today is basically the same as what these Victorian children would have worn: think tinsel, sparkly sequins, and translucent, gauzy wings.

Huge popularity

Moving into the 20th Century, fairies showed few signs of buzzing off – if anything, they cemented their place. "In the Edwardian era, Peter Pan started to be performed [in 1904], and that carried on for the next 25 years," points out Slattery Clark – enough time for several generations of children to learn to clap their hands to show they believe in fairies.

And as the new century lurched through global upheaval via World War One, fairy mania continued – if anything, widening and deepening. "That golden age of children's literature is really an upper middle-class phenomenon," points out Sage. "What happened from World War One onwards is it explodes beyond that, and becomes an adult concern."

(The costumes displayed in the exhibition are based on the Flower Fairies illustrations (Credit: Pete Carr))

Having been whisked from the woods into the nursery, fairies then made their way to troubled adults on the battlefield or waiting at home. Consider the huge popularity of a print, Piper of Dreams by Estella Canziani, during World War One: a wispy image of a man playing a pipe and surrounded by tiny fairies, it sold a staggering quarter of a million copies in just 1916.

"It's about belief and it's about hope – that's what fairies represent in that time," says Sage. "The supernatural becomes a way of finding some luck and brightness, [when] people don't have control over their lives, their future, their families."

For Conan Doyle, it was all about a search for another realm of being that related to life after death, vibrations, telepathy, telekinesis – Alice Sage

Today, we associate fairies with little girls – but this was an era when fairy art was popular with grown men, too. And technology helped spread it: there was an explosion in sending postcards around this time. They were cheap to buy, and free to post to a serving soldier abroad. "Suddenly everyone can send fairies, and they're flying through the air and across the seas. You can’t underestimate the practical aspect of it," says Sage.

Indeed, Barker herself cut her teeth illustrating such postcards: she produced a patriotic series showing "Children of the Allies", in different forms of national dress, in 1915, followed by a series of characters from Shakespeare, before teasing the Flower Fairies with a set of "Fairies and Elves" postcards in 1918.

Barker never made any claims for fairies being real – "I have never seen a fairy", she wrote in a foreword to Flower Fairies of the Wayside. But it is worth noting that she first published the Flower Fairies at a moment when the desire to believe in magical beings was at a rare high. In 1920, Britain was gripped by the story of the Cottingley Fairies, after two girls claimed to have photographed fairies at the bottom of their garden in West Yorkshire – and were widely believed.

Their beautiful photographs were created by paper cut-outs, floating on hat pins. Although many were sceptical, they nonetheless also fooled many of the great and the good – the photographs were brought to prominence by no less than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, who wrote a whole book about it, The Coming of the Fairies, in 1922.

(The Crocus Fairies from Flower Fairies of the Spring – the watercolours are still popular today with “fairycore” fans (Credit: Estate of Cicely Mary Barker 1934 Flower Fairies))

Cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths were aged 16 and nine when they took the first photos. Many years later, in the 1980s, they admitted it was a hoax, explaining that they kept up the pretence that the fairies were real a because they felt sorry for the middle-aged men, like Conan Doyle, that so wanted to believe. There was, at the time, a serious resurgence in spiritualism in the UK, with seances and attempts to contact the dead proving understandably tempting for the bereaved. Conan Doyle himself became interested in a spirit world after his son died in the war. And for believers, this wasn't "woo-woo" nonsense – it was supposedly based in science. After all, scientific advances were genuinely explaining hitherto unknown and invisible aspects of our world.

"For Conan Doyle, it was all about a search for another realm of being that related to life after death, vibrations, telepathy, telekinesis – this fascinating world on the edge of the limits of human perception," says Sage. "And obviously that's connected to the loss of his son in World War One."

Like the Flower Fairies, the Cottingley photographs further reinforced the association between children and fairies, as well as cementing what a fairy looked like in the public consciousness. Yet aside from Tinkerbell, Flower Fairies are probably the only image from the fairy-fever era still instantly recognisable today. Why, of all the fairy content out there, have Barker's images endured so strongly over the past 100 years?

"They were [originally published] in full colour, and a lot of books were published in black and white," begins Sage. What looked novel at the time, now seems charmingly period – but the delicacy, intricacy, and imagination of Barker's pictures can still cast a spell. "It's like dolls houses – things that are very miniaturised, but very detailed and realistic, scratch a certain itch," suggests Sage. "They are absolutely beautiful, which helps."

"It's a real celebration of nature – there is a strong educational aspect to her work," puts forward Slattery Clark, emphasising the botanical accuracy of Barker’s drawings. The educational argument might sound absurd given we're discussing fairy art, but as a child who was obsessed with Flower Fairies, I can attest to the truth of it: all the wildflowers I know the names of I learned from these books.

(Cicely Mary Barker's exquisite illustrations were hugely popular in the 1920s (Credit: Estate of Cicely Mary Barker))

Having each fairy very specifically related to a particular plant was also commercially canny – whether Barker intended this or not, it created space for identification, for collectability, for a kind of innate brand franchising. "In children's culture, we create series that are collectable, that you identify with… It's like Pokemon or something!" laughs Sage. "When I speak to people about the Flower Fairies, especially groups of sisters, it's always 'which one were you?'"

Still, Sage is pleased to see the Flower Fairies exhibited in a fine art context at the Lady Lever gallery. For a long time, men painting fairies has been considered art – but when women do it, it's just silly flowery stuff for children.

"This is fine art – it's mass, popular fine art," insists Sage. "I think a lot of the diminishment of fairies and children's illustration is from a misogynist, snobbish and elitist art historical tradition. I'm so excited to see this kind of exhibition, that reclaims this history." Consider this a beating of wings, then, that takes fairies back out of the nursery – and into the gallery.

Flower Fairies is at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight Village, UK until 5 November.

Holly Williams' novel What Time is Love? is out in paperback now.___