… the one I got as a present for my 8th birthday. It’s a Russian translation of several English stories for children (The Hobbit was my favourite, Peter Pan a close second, and it’s obvious from the way the pages look), and it used to have small black-and-white illustrations at the beginning of each chapter.

However, at that age I strongly disliked “colourless” illustrations – so of course I decided to “fix” them.

The first one, at the beginning, still looks nice:

​Here’s Bilbo in the first chapter, with overly red cheeks and bright blue smoke. But as I just noticed there’s a line about Hobbits liking to dress in green and yellow, so kudos to little me for keeping that in mind.

The Dwarves all got sufficiently colourful cloaks. It’s really not surprising they were noticed by every single enemy they encountered.

Then there’s an Elf of Rivendell (who probably looks best), a really colourful goblin, and an Elf of Mirkwood (who would’ve looked better if i hadn’t used a yellow text marker for his hair, skin, cloak and the torch):

Of course, I generally liked that yellow text marker way too much. You see, my parents were using it to mark keywords at the time. I didn’t care about keywords at all and did this:

While not every page looks like that, there are a lot. Most of them, really. At some point the text marker ran out and I continued with a yellow pencil. I still remember feeling really smart and grown-up because it seemed like such an adult thing.

Here’s Smaug setting Esgaroth on fire. For some reason, he is green this time. With lilac wings. Look, it’s not absurd at all for dragons to be able to change colours like chameleons!

Then we have these warriors with their lovely pink and yellow armour:

The Battle of the Five Armies:

The elf’s red hair means I’ve predicted Tauriel! (On the other hand, this looks like it might be Maedhros, if you ignore that he has no way to be there). It’s also interesting how I gave everyone the same liver problems

admittedly

horrible skin color. Of course, the goblins already looked more like the other species than in most other depictions, the major difference is their hateful expression (and their fashion :D). I like how it shows they’re evil and hated because of what they are like on the inside, not because of the way they look. (The idea of a completely evil race is still problematic, but less so if they don’t look that much uglier than the good guys.)

The last interesting illustration is this one with Thranduil, Bilbo, and Bard:

I really did have some weird thing for pink armour (with some green parts). Also, Bard is… Blueb(e)ard. But hey, I made Thranduil blond. I’m so good at predictions 🙂

Anyway, all this shows how much I loved that book, and it’s absolutely not surprising that I’m in the Tolkien fandom now.