A friend of mine pointed me to this today, and it’s too good to keep to myself.

In the 1970s, professor J.R.R. Tolkien made a few audio recordings of some readings from his works The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings which were released through the spoken-word label Caedmon Audio. Around the same time Tolkien authorized a adaptation of The Hobbit to be made through the UK record label Argo Records which had been absorbed by Decca Records at the time. This adaptation was spearheaded by Demi Demetriou who enlisted the help of the Scottish actor Nicol Williamson. His talent with voicework allowed him to collaborate with audio director Harely Usill in re-editing the original script, removing many ‘he said, she said, said so and so’ etc, and relying instead on his vocal character performances to convey who was saying what to whom. As a result the resulting abridged version of The Hobbit was both dramatic and unique without an over-reliance on the descriptive narrative.

The recordings were released on 4 vinyl LPs in 1974 by Conifer Records. This version been sourced from such a set and is offered under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license

In memorandum of Nicol Williamson (1936 – 2011)

We’ve listened, precious, and we loves it.

The Old Wolf has spoken.