Thursday 22 November 2012

the abiding place or средизе́мье

Some months ago, I remembered, a contributing curator for the panoply of pasts real and imagined, the Retronaut, re-discovered and introduced a wonderful illustrated Russian edition of The Hobbit (Хоббит) from 1976. It is interesting how despite the difference in the way the characters are interpreted (I suppose all readers had their own formative images on how the figures ought to look), they are instantly recognizable and impart the same exciting scenes without having to puzzle anything out, like the lands depicted on this map of Middle Earth that don’t require a legend.