did you know that Tove Jansson's protrayal of Gollum in her illustrations of the 1962 Finnish translation of the Hobbit is what caused Tolkien to rewrite his description of Gollum's appearance his second edition of the Hobbit because he found it so incredibly monstrous but realized that it was still wholly accurate to the original text
imagine that the author of a story you loved thought your intepretation of what a character looks like was so egregious that he went back and changed the canon description just so it didn't happen again
These are Tove's illustrations I'm talking about for those who might not have seen it
Here's Gollum's description from the 1st edition of the Hobbit:
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 in his thin face.
And here's Gollum's decription from the amended 2nd edition of the Hobbit:
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.
He just thought it was important to make it incredibly clear that Gollum was meant to be a small (and slimy...) creature
