Almost Happened: Maurice Sendak's 'The Hobbit'

With filming finally underway on the long-delayed Hobbit movie, we're hearing about all sort of "wow that would have been so cool and it totally almost happened" stories about previous efforts at Tolkein adaptations.

You may have heard, for instance, of Stanley Kubrick's attempts at making a Lord of the Rings movie in the '60s - starring The Beatles! Completely batshit crazy, to be sure, but by all accounts absolutely true, albeit shut down by the protective Tolkein, and it's probably for the best for all parties' legacies.

But here's one I file under "missed opportunity" - Maurice "Where the Wild Things Are" Sendak very nearly did an illustrated children's book adaptation of The Hobbit. How did this one get scuttled, and why?

Says the LA Times:

As Sendak noted passages for possible illustration and sketched in the margins of his copy of the book, the publisher prepared the art samples for Tolkien’s approval. The editor mislabeled the samples, however, identifying the wood-elves as “hobbits,” as Sendak recalled to Maguire. This blunder nettled Tolkien. His reply was that Sendak had not read the book closely and did not know what a hobbit was. Consequently, Tolkien did not approve the drawings. Sendak was furious.

In hopes that all could be smoothed over between the two, the publisher arranged for a meeting in Oxford while Sendak was in England touring for the U.K. release of “Wild Things.” The day before their meeting, Sendak suffered his first major heart attack. He was 39. Sendak spent several weeks recovering in a hospital in Birmingham. He never met with Tolkien, and the project was abandoned.

The only surviving evidence of what would have doubtless been one of the greatest children's books EVAR is the above illustration, and Sendak's marked-up copy of The Hobbit, which he donated to Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.