The Hobbit: 1979 Mind’s Eye Radio Drama - J.R.R. Tolkien Audiobook

Written by J.R.R. Tolkien
Read by Erik Bauersfeld, Gail Chugg, Bernard Mayes, Ray Reinhardt, full cast
Format: M4B
Dramatization

Bilbo Baggins, a gentle hobbit who loves the comforts of home, reluctantly joins a company of dwarves on a journey to recover plundered gold from a fierce dragon. It’s a tale of high adventure and astonishing courage, and a magical prelude to the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In 1979, the Mind’s Eye produced this radio series of The Hobbit, adapted and directed by Bob Lewis. Radio drama was a rarity in the United States at that time, and this production was popular at the time of its broadcast on National Public Radio. Mind’s Eye would reuse most of the cast for their radio series of The Lord of the Rings of the same year (not to be confused with the superior BBC radio production produced in 1981).

The music featured in the radio drama were pulled from production music produced by Major Records. Primarily Featuring composer Roger Roger but also contains works from George Chase and Sam Trust. They would use the same music library for their adaptation of Lord of The Rings, some pieces being shared between the two.

Cast

Erik Bauersfeld ….. Smaug, Bard
Gail Chugg ….. Narrator, Gollum, Balin
Pat Franklyn ….. Roac, The Elven King, Bombur
Carl Hague ….. Elrond
Joe Hughes ….. Great Goblin, Beorn
Tom Luce ….. Thorin
Bernard Mayes ….. Gandalf
Ray Reinhardt ….. Bilbo Baggins

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This is not my rip. I created the cover art based on an existing paperback cover, since no decent album art existed, and edited the files into a chapterized m4b. I also removed the part credits that I believe appeared at the start and end of each tape/disc, so it now runs as a seamless omnibus edition, with no interruptions throughout. It is instead broken into the chapters from the book.

Is it any good? I don’t know - I have only skimmed it! This was more in the spirit of preservation for Tolkien completists. In my opinion, the American accents are a little jarring in Middle Earth, and some of the name pronunciations will sound off to anyone used to Peter Jackson’s movies. Also, the performers here apparently recorded all their lines independently, unlike similar BBC audio dramas that gathered all the performers in one room to perform together. The end result is that the performances are just not as good. Either way, it’s an interesting curiosity, and offers an alternative to the BBC Hobbit audio drama produced in 1969, only a year after the Hobbit was published.

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A Note on Metadata

One of my frustrations with the audio content I download from ABB is the amount of time I always need to spend fixing the metadata and adding cover art to make it work nicely with Plex/Prologue. With that in mind, all audio content I share on ABB will always have complete and correct metadata, including:

- Author and Title
- Description (using the DESCRIPTION field read that can read by Plex)
- Narrator (using the COMPOSER field which can be read by Prologue)
- Genre Tags (I add all relevant Genres typically taken from Goodreads. These can be used to create smart collections in Plex.)
- Cover Art (I always use the highest resolution image I can find. Where none exists, I will find a suitable image from the internet - often r/audiobookcovers - or create one based on existing artwork.

Furthermore, the audio will always be in m4b format (to support chapter markers and ensure Plex can read the Description tag). The audio will always be correctly chapterized, where necessary, and chapter markers will be correctly named.

This means that all content I share here can be considered Plex/Prologue-ready with all metadata and artwork included. I hope this encourages others to do the same.

(FYI: I typically add metadata using kid3 and chapter markers using Ocenaudio.)