ONTD

I'm keen to catch The Hobbit soon. If nothing else, the Seventh Doctor apparently goes full-on wizard battle against the Witch-King in it, and I would have paid just to see that scene alone. The rest of it looks cool too, though.

In the meantime, I have to wait for an overnight babysitter to free up so I can catch the three-hour flick. I'm tiding myself over replaying the PS2 Hobbit game and listening to Hobbit songs.

You might think that there hasn't been much said in song about Hobbits since Leonard Nimoy and Charles Randolph Grean's "Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" gave us arguably the greatest music video of all time, but you'd be wrong. There's been plenty of Hobbit love in pop music... though I really should have gone with another turn of phrase there.







"Frodo of the Nine Fingers," from The Lord of the Rings
You've probably scene the 1977 Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit, but the rather pointless 1980 follow-up Return of the King is slightly lesser-known. It's not that it's bad. It's just that they tried to sum up the entirety of The Lord of the Rings in one film, then market it as a sequel to the Ralph Bakshi film that never got the part 2 it deserved since United Artists' management was apparently made up of coked-up orangutans at the time.

It's still a good film. Same brilliant art. Maury Laws turned in some original tunes again, though they were a lot less Tolkien-esque this time around, but Glenn Yarbrough still sings the hell out of 'em. Here's a ballad meant to recap Bilbo's journey.



Blind Guardian, "Into the Storm"
Blind Guardian more or less made an entire career out of being inspired by Tolkien, but their 1998 album Nightfall in Middle-Earth went all-out. It deals with much of The Silmarillion, a chronicle of the beginning of the world up until the Third Age we are all more familiar with. Basically, it's the poofy elvish Bible.

"Into the Storm" sums up the same themes of covetousness that make up a large part of The Hobbit (Gollum's desire for the ring, Thorin's quest to reclaim his stolen treasure) by following Sauron's old master Morgoth and Ungoliant, the mother of all the giant spiders, as they assault Valinor and steal the three Silmarils. Death and destruction abound, and as the song says in foreshadowing, "We are following the will of the One."



Marc Gunn, ""Don't Go Drinking With Hobbits"
Texas's own Marc Gunn of the Brobdingnagian Bards is nothing less than a Renaissance success story. The Bards were even tapped to headline a The Return of the King Oscar party, and if you hang around ren-fests and sci fi conventions long enough you'll likely hear Gunn perform his ode to the Hobbits' famous appetite for beer, "Don't Go Drinking With Hobbits." It's a nice, light-hearted tune full of good cheer and good times, which is what we need after Blind Guardian.



Erwin Beekveld, "They're Taking the Hobbit to Isengard"
In 2005 Dutch musician and photographer Erwin Beekveld made a murderously addictive earworm when he put together some electro dance music over samples from the Peter Jackson films called "They're Taking the Hobbit to Isengard." If you really like it, you can listen to it on a ten-hour loop.

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