After my last post, I didn’t have access to the internet in any of the other hotels my tour stayed in in Jordan. I arrived back in London with the group yesterday and am spending a few days here before returning home.

I said I would post a picture from the trip. That’s me standing in front of the Treasury at Petra. You may recognize it as the location used for the building housing the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. You can see why I wanted to visit it!

For once, no really significant news about the Hobbit film(s) or the Tolkien Trust lawsuit seems to have broken while I was away. TheOneRing.net, however, has posted a transcript of part of an interview Sohaib Awan did with Michael Hague on his radio show recently.

Hague did the illustrations for an edition of The Hobbit published back in 1984. It’s one of my favorite sets of illustrations, well worth a look if you haven’t seen them. They’re very different from Alan Lee’s. Lee’s are muted watercolors, beautiful and serene. Hague’s are bright and much more aimed at children. They have a slightly old-fashioned feel and remind me of the style of the pictures in books my parents read me when I was very young. The edition is still in print, by the way, and a good present for a child just about reaching Hobbit-reading age.

Hague doesn’t actually say much about The Hobbit in the interview, apart from revealing that he’s a big fan of the Peter Jackson LOTR and has not been asked to work on the Hobbit project. One can see why. With Lee and John Howe both back to do conceptual drawings, the filmmakers presumably want to keep a continuity with the trilogy. Hague’s style, wonderful thought it is, wouldn’t blend well with theirs.

Hague does drop one remark that surprised me: “As you said, I did the book The Hobbit early in my career and if I were to do it again it would be quite different. I do remember being rushed on it, one of the things you can’t quite go back and re-do, I guess.”

He provided 48 detailed paintings for the book, and none of them shows any sign—to me anyway—of being rushed. Nor do they seem the work of an immature artist. It boggles my mind to think that he would do a “quite different” set of illustrations at this point in his career. I would love to see what they would look like. It’s too bad that no one will commission him to do a whole new set of images!