An exciting crossover is about to reach English-language readers for the first time: Tove Jansson‘s The Hobbit.
Check out the Instagram announcement below:
In 1960, J.R.R. Tolkien‘s publisher approached Jansson, the Finnish artist beloved worldwide as the creator of the Moomins, with an unusual request: to illustrate the Swedish-language edition of The Hobbit. The request came from none other than Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Longstocking), the Swedish children’s book legend who was at the time a publisher at Rabén & Sjögren. Lindgren, clearly sensing the magnitude of the pairing, wrote to Jansson with characteristic flair: “God bless you for Toffle!! But who will comfort Astrid if you don’t agree to the proposal I’m now going to make to you? … this will be the children’s book of the century, and will live long after we are dead and buried.”
Jansson said yes, and the result (Bilbo – en hobbits äventyr) was a quietly extraordinary artifact:
Jansson told Lindgren she wanted to keep the illustrations for the Tolkien book separate from the style she had developed for her own Moomin world. ‘I have tried to free myself from my “Moomin style” with its careful line-drawing and painstakingly filled surfaces,’ Jansson wrote to Lindgren. She strived to interpret Tolkien’s characters freely and did not sketch with pencil beneath the felt pen, as she was used to doing in her Moomin illustrations. When she drew Tolkien’s characters, she made up to sixty different versions of every character before she was satisfied. As an illustrator, Jansson trusted that the advanced printing techniques of the 1960s would guarantee that her method of gluing together different drawings to make the illustrations would not be visible in the final book.
Published two years later, Jansson’s tender, whimsical linework brought Bilbo Baggins, Gollum, and the Misty Mountains to life in a way no other artist ever had. For over six decades, that edition remained inaccessible to English-speaking readers… but that’s finally about to change.
Jansson’s sensibility is a fascinating match for Middle-earth. Where other illustrators have leaned into the epic grandeur of Tolkien’s world, her drawings bring something altogether different—warmth, humor, and a slightly dreamy domesticity that contrasts the cozy safety of Bag End and the riddled dark under the Misty Mountains feel all the more vivid. It’s The Hobbit as a story about a small creature in a very large world, which, of course, is exactly what it is.
To mark the 90th anniversary of The Hobbit, a landmark new English-language edition featuring Jansson’s original illustrations is set to be published in the United Kingdom on Thursday, September 24, 2026, followed by a United States release on Tuesday, October 6, 2026. It marks the first time these drawings have ever appeared in an English edition of the book, a publishing event that fans of Tolkien, Jansson, or both have only dreamed about.
