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“The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” is a song composed by Charles R. 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 originally appeared on The Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy (Dot Records Cat. DLP 25835, 1968), the second of Nimoy’s albums on Dot Records. It was also released as a single (Dot Records Cat. #45-17028), backed with a “modern thought-image” folk song called “Cotton Candy”.

A music video was produced (actually a segment of the Malibu U television variety show, July 28, 1967), featuring Nimoy (wearing his Star Trek hairstyle) and a group of color-coordinated photogenic teenagers, all wearing plastic Vulcan ears, singing and dancing on a beach. Since its rediscovery on the BBC2 documentary Funk Me Up Scotty and propagation over the Internet, it has become a relatively well-known example of 1960s camp.

Fans of Nimoy were intrigued, not by the video or the song, but by the fact (revealed in interviews) that Nimoy had read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and been exceedingly impressed by it. From approximately 1968 to 1973, several Nimoy and Star Trek fanzine writers and editors (notably Regina Marvinny’s Nimoyan Federation) discussed the idea of a live-action Lord of the Rings film, with Nimoy playing Aragorn, and there was a brief letter campaign.

An audio clip of the song was played as part of a question on an episode of Jeopardy! aired January 5, 2006. The video was also a feature on VH1’s Web Junk 20.

A portion also appears in a videoclip by Lords of the Rhymes and in Joseph Blanchette’s One Ring to Rule Them All series.

It was also aired at the end of Sarah Cox’s appearance on Room 101.
Source: Wikipedia