Bilbo le Hobbit
Rare first printing, with its dust jacket in perfect condition.
Bilbo le Hobbit is a fantasy novel by the British writer J. R. R. Tolkien recounting the adventures of Bilbo (or Bilbon), drawn against his will by the wizard Gandalf and a company of thirteen dwarves into their journey to the Lonely Mountain to reclaim the treasure stolen and guarded by the dragon Smaug.
The Hobbit — its original title — was published on September 21, 1937, in the United Kingdom. It was the first published work to explore the world of Middle-earth, on which Tolkien had been working for some twenty years. Its critical and commercial success led Allen & Unwin to ask its author for a sequel. That sequel became Tolkien’s best-known novel, The Lord of the Rings, a far more complex and darker work.
It would nevertheless take more than thirty years for the saga to be published in French: Francis Ledoux’s translation of this first volume appeared in early 1969. It includes the complete text along with two maps drawn by Tolkien. He had originally wanted to include five, some of them “magic” maps printed so as to be visible only by transparency. This process proved too costly, so the book ultimately includes only the map of Thrór and that of the Wilderland, reproduced here on each doublure of the boards.
The first translation of The Hobbit into a foreign language was the Swedish edition, published in 1947. The success of The Lord of the Rings prompted foreign publishers to bring out translations of The Hobbit: the earliest, issued during Tolkien’s lifetime, were in German (1957), Dutch (1960), Polish (1960), Portuguese (1962), Spanish (1964), Japanese (1965), Danish (1969), Norwegian (1972), Finnish (1973), Italian (1973) and Slovak (1973). The idea of a French translation was raised by Allen & Unwin as early as November 1937: Tolkien recommended his friend Simonne d’Ardenne as translator, following her work on the first French version of Farmer Giles of Ham, one of his earlier books. In the end, The Hobbit was not translated into French by Francis Ledoux until 1969, in a general list at Éditions Stock aimed at an adult readership. In 1976, it was reissued in the “Bibliothèque verte” series, evidence of a shift in French perception of fantasy toward children’s literature. The title nonetheless met with modest success: the Stock copies sold slowly, and it would take nearly ten years before a second printing appeared, in June 1978.
This first edition is today of great rarity.