“It sets the stage for everything, that for him the visual and the textual hand in hand.DetailsTHE FABLED LANDS II EXPANSION IS LIVE! “ important that it’s a poem and an illustration together,” McQuillen said. Likewise, Tolkien’s early poem about Eärendil and the deserted elven city also showed that he regarded both sides of his practice equally. “As he was writing the story, he would draw the scenes to help him create the textual description…and, in turn, what he was writing would inform his illustrations.” Tolkien conceptualized The Hobbit with a single opening line-“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”-accompanied by his rendition of Thrór’s Map, which the protagonists would follow on their quest (and for a couple of years, McQuillen noted, that was as far as Tolkien got). But that doesn’t mean they weren’t an integral part of his process. “It’s funny because he never thought much of his drawings, and in typical Tolkien and maybe British fashion, always disparaged them as not too good or of high quality,” McQuillen explained. “This was not his main line of work, and he always felt guilty for taking time away from his academic duties and his children to work on his so-called ‘fairy stories,’” McQuillen said.īut even so, Tolkien was still a prolific author and artist, though he never considered himself to be the latter. He was committed to his family, only turning to hobbits, elves, wizards, and orcs in his spare time. For example, he made a drawing of an owl for his son, Michael, to assuage the boy’s fears from a recurring avian nightmare, as well as yearly illustrated letters from Father Christmas. He sketched nature prolifically and made artworks for his children. Tolkien’s drawings weren’t limited to places in far-flung worlds or distant eras, however. Being able to see that “initial moment,” he added, is “rare.” “It’s a beautiful drawing…but it’s also great to see the birth of Middle-earth,” McQuillen said. A poem opposite the watercolor heralds the first appearance of Eärendil, a character in The Silmarillion, who finds the city abandoned by the gods. His first illustration that was directly related to Middle-earth, The Shores of Faery, dated May 1915, depicted Kôr, the city of elves in Valinor. “That kind of imagery was so embedded in who he was. He sketched “distant mountain landscapes, or paths through dark forests,” McQuillen described.
In the 1910s, during his undergraduate years at Exeter College, Tolkien filled pages of his sketchbook with abstract settings from a technicolor fairy world, places redolent of Middle-earth.
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Tolkien began his art practice in his youth he learned how to draw and paint from his mother, and later, at school. (Tolkien’s publisher in the United States declined to publish his dust-jacket art, believing it to be “too British,” according to the exhibition catalogue.)
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Though some of his illustrations appeared in the first edition of The Hobbit-such as his pastoral view of Hobbiton-across-the-water, and his mountainous scenes for the book’s dust-jacket design-the original editions of The Lord of the Rings had no room for full illustrations, and many of his works were not available to the public until they were acquired by the Bodleian after his death. The exhibition, open through May 12th (it was previously shown at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, where Tolkien was a professor), features a number of artworks from the late high-fantasy author. McQuillen, Ph.D., curator of “Tolkien: Maker of Middle Earth” at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, explained, the author began each of his stories with a map, because “the story didn’t create the geography the geography helped create the story.” Through watercolor and ink illustrations, Tolkien imagined sunlit, sinuous rivers snow-capped peaks and the depths of dragon lairs, all of which needed to be carefully plotted on a map.
“I have, I suppose, constructed an imaginary time, but kept my feet on my own mother-earth for place,” he wrote. Tolkien’s Middle-earth was not located on another planet, nor in a neighboring timeline, he revealed in letters written in the 1950s, but it lay on the same latitudes as Europe, long ago.
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