The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins


"The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" is a song composed by Charles Randolph Grean and performed by Leonard Nimoy, telling the story of Bilbo Baggins and his adventures in J. R. R. Tolkien's novel The Hobbit. The recording was featured on Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy, the second of Nimoy's albums on Dot Records. It was also released as a single in July 1967, backed with a "modern thought-image" folk song called "Cotton Candy".
When the single was originally released, Nimoy lip-synched to the recording during a guest appearance on the July 28, 1967 episode of Malibu U, a short-lived variety television series. This segment survives as a "music video" and shows Nimoy and a group of color-coordinated young women, all wearing plastic pointed ears, singing and dancing an overtly strange, waddling dance on a beach. Clothing and random objects would fly up from behind a hill, and a variety of buttons with strange Hobbit/Star Trek slogans were occasionally visible.
Since its rediscovery on the BBC2 documentary Funk Me Up Scotty and propagation over the Internet, it has been treated as an example of 1960s camp. An excerpt from the musical number is included in the documentaries about The Lord of the Rings fandom, and in For the Love of Spock. The song was also included in the 1993 Nimoy compilation album Highly Illogical.