Holiday Traditions - Food AND John Howe Illustrations

Discussions have been moving around regarding the elk (possibly an Irish Elk - long extinct) that Thranduil is riding and the appearance of the Goblin King in The Hobbit. I'll show some artwork below the cut that may help the discussion below the cut, but want to continue my Holiday Traditions post first.

Holiday food. We all have foods that we remember as having been served most frequently at specific times of the year. Maybe it was a special birthday cake that your family only had that one time each year. Or maybe it was the turkey for Thanksgiving or a cookie recipe that only gets made around the end of the year. One of my own traditions is a holiday ham - more specifically a Honey Baked spiral sliced ham. YUMMY!

We eat it and share generous portions with my father-by-marriage and Chickie, 

and cherish every fattening bite. So good!

We also have Chex Mix (it's a very USA thing - a snack food made with a variety of cereals, Worcester sauce, nuts and butter all baked together to insure that the liquids penetrate the grains. Very tasty. We don't do cookies, but when we were younger and had a more reliable oven we did spritzes. My mother always baked German cookies - vanilla kipfel were here specialty. I'm getting hungry already - LOL.

Now, on to The Hobbit. Reading comments by friends who have seen the film, some of the commentary has revolved around the Goblin King and the beast that Thranduil is riding. So, I present some artwork by John Howe that may help clarify these two scenes. The Goblin King and The Great Goblin have been around for a while. The elf mounted on the elk, I'm less sure about provenance about - it could have been part of the storyboards for the movie, not an independent artwork. Either way, though, the pieces are interesting to look at as all of John Howe's pieces are.

The Great Goblin by John Howe

The Goblin King by John Howe

Elf by John Howe

So there you go - a lot of similarities here. The first pic I could swear I've seen in a larger format where the dwarves were being presented to the Goblin King, but I couldn't find it when I was hunting for the image this morning. However, I think this gives a good indication of what he was trying to show. Peter Jackson gets a lot of his inspiration from the artwork of John Howe and Alan Lee, so here you go - three views by John Howe that may have made their way into the film in a fashion.