Tintin Forums

Please, has anyone heard of an Egyptian 'fresco' drawn by Hergé in 1978 ?

This was a Christmas card depicting Jolyon Wagg and his family, the Thompsons, Rastapopoulos, Alcazar and Peggy, Nestor, Igor Wagner, Irma, Bianca Castafiore, Calculus, Allan, Haddock, and finally Tintin, Snowy and the Marlinspike Hall cat. It is reproduced on pages 156-7 of the English (1989) version of Benoit Peeters' Tintin and the World of Hergé or 174-5 of the French (2004) edition.

Ed

Yes, it was a Christmas card design drawn by Hergé in 1977/78. It's reproduced in full in Le Monde d'Hergé, but if anyone hasn't got it to hand, I've scanned it :

Hergé's Egyptian fresco, 1977 (187kb)

The Christmas card designs he came up with over the years are fascinating, they're imaginative, and some are really beautiful. The medieval illuminated manuscript, for example, or the silouhettes of Tintin & co. walking to Midnight Mass. It's worth checking out Tout Hergé for a full series of the cards, albeit in thumbnail images.

Edit : Sorry Ed, double-posting again !

No problem Richard, thanks for the scan!

You'll notice that each character has their name (in French!) represented by the hieroglyphs next to their image.

On the subject of Christmas cards, I'm particularly taken by those ones of the characters walking to Midnight Mass in the snow; they're brilliantly evocative. There are several in the same vein, I believe.

Ed

At the risk of going off-topic a bit, there's a selection of Hergé's Christmas cards here ; click on the thumbnail image, then the one in the middle of the new page to give you a larger version of it.

And now, to get back on topic with a masterstroke* ... the Egyptian fresco image is on that webpage.

* definitions of masterstrokes may vary.

This is hilarious! Very creative on the part of Herge. It's not that easy to identify who is where on that Hieroglyphs. Probably a few days will be needed to get that done.

"The inhabitants of Ancient Egypt were called mummies"
--Anonymous Student Blooper cited by Richard Lederer

Thanks a lot Richard for scanning this beautiful 'fresco' drawing by Herge!

According to the data obtained from books about Egyptian writing, it sounds every character in this 'fresco' is accompanied by his/her own hieroglyphic name, sometimes with a strangely distorted phonetics: for instance Tournesol (Calculus) reads 'Tornosol', 'Tornosor', 'Tolnosol' or 'Tolnosor', Peggy reads 'Pagi', Herge reads 'Hirgi', etc... as if they were meant to stand for 'duplications', or... err... avatars...

How come some differ from the others, with their names inscribed in a 'cartouche' (just like the author's one, bottom right...)?

it sounds every character in this 'fresco' is accompanied by his/her own hieroglyphic name, sometimes with a strangely distorted phonetics...

There can be no exact correlation between hieroglyphs representing ancient Egyptian and the characters that make up our modern Western script. For example, Herge has used the same 'vulture' character for A as for E (compare the three in "Alcazar" with "Nestor" where it is used in place of the E). Similarly the same character (an oval) is used for both R and N. Where the same hieroglyph represents different Western characters, it depends on pronounciation and the context of the letters.

Also it doesn't help that the authorities don't always agree on exactly what they mean. The Rosetta Stone is only so much help, the rest is guesswork.

But I do particularly like Haddock exclaiming "Mille sabords!".

Ed