Or possibly not…

years ago I was at a mates house and his dad loaned me his copy of the hobbit…yeah, that was nice of him, I hear you cry… interestingly it was a first edition of the hobbit and it is different to the later editions…

The one that always stuck out to me was that Gollum offers the ring to Bilbo if he wins the riddle game, which is sacrosanct to Gollum. He couldn’t find his ring and was extremely apologetic to Bilbo, Bilbo who had already found it and said nowt about it!”I don’t know how many times Gollum begged Bilbo’s pardon. He kept on saying: ‘We are ssory; we didn’t mean to cheat, we meant to give it our only pressent, if it won the competition.”

Oh and there was definitely no ‘we hates him forever!’

Funnily enough, not that I can remember, Tolkien failed to describe Gollum, and as such various illustrations appeared… now anyone who has seen the Peter Jackson films will forevermore see Gollum looking like this…

However Tove Jansson, a Swedish illustrator ( of ‘The Moomins’ fame) drew him like this…

So as you can see, there is a bit of a height difference… this discrepancy led Tolkien to do a bit of an edit in relation to the size of Gollum.

First Edition…”Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum. I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum — as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes.”

Later editions…“Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum—as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face.”

You probably already knew all of this, but it might be interesting if you didn’t… why bring this up now…well I heard on the radio yesterday that a charity shop had been given a first edition and the owner nearly binned it ad they thought it wouldn’t sell.