The art of Tolkien: Exploring the visual world of Middle-earth

JRR Tolkien's first installment of 'The Lord of the Rings', 'Fellowship of the Ring', was published 69 years ago.

Tolkien the writer or Tolkien the artist — whom would you pick? Even JRR Tolkien, author of the phenomenal Hobbit (1937), Lord of the Rings Trilogy (1954-55), the posthumous volume The Simarillion (1977) and the creator of Elvish languages, would most likely pick the ‘writer’. However, it was his richly illustrated maps of the geography of the Middle-earth that helped create those stories.

It seems fitting to cast a light on Tolkien’s little known art practice which shaped the Middle-earth on the 69th anniversary of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Much of his art was on public display when Bodleian Library at Oxford University, where Tolkien had worked as a professor, hosted what it called as ‘once-in-a-generation’ exhibition in 2018, titled Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth. The exhibition explored his legacy from his genius as an artist, poet, linguist, and author and travelled to the Morgan Library & Museum New York the following year. John McQuillen, PhD, and Associate curator of the library, recollects his experience of seeing the artworks firsthand. “For me, no digital or analog reproduction is better than the original object. The colours, light, and texture never come through 100% in a reproduction. Knowing that the hand of the artist/author produced the very object you are looking at, always carries a certain aura. There's always so much detail to look at in a Tolkien drawing, whether a map, a Father Christmas letter to his kids, the Tree of Amalion, or Lothlorien in Springtime. There is a world there for the viewer to explore. In the exhibition at the Morgan, I placed the Lothlorien in Springtime and Barad-dur drawings next to each other — two lands that are so completely opposed and yet Tolkien's eye for detail and ability to create the sense of the place was the same.”

Drawing inspiration

Tolkien’s artwork ranges from landscapes, towering mountains covered in clouds, to fantastical scenes, drawings and paintings done for The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. Often, the artworks were predominantly for his own reference, like the ones he did for The Lord of the Rings. Some of his paintings, like the dust jacket design for The Hobbit (April 1937) has been inspired by the Japanese and Chinese style of paintings. When Tolkien was in Oxford with the Bodleian Library and Ashmolean Museum at his disposal; both institutions held material from different cultures apart from books published on the material. “Just like in his writing, Tolkien drew on visual elements from world cultures as well,” McQuillen notes. “He had ample resources to draw inspiration from the visual traditions of many cultures and time periods. You see elements of European styles — Celtic, medieval, or Art Nouveau — in his work but also visual characteristics more common to Japanese woodblock prints and ink paintings, and even Mughal manuscript painting.”

The cartographer

One significant aspect of his art was cartography and judging by the maps he created, it was clear that those were the plot drivers and the reason why the characters moved around the way they did. McQuillen stresses that Tolkien saw Middle-earth as a place that had physicality so there had to be internal validity to the world, which is why maps were so important to his creative process. “His characters moved within a real space and the maps helped him to understand how they would travel from place to place and the time that would take (not like modern tv shows and movies where characters seem to take 10 minutes to travel across an entire city). For The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien produced charts to keep track of where the individual characters were after the breaking of the fellowship, so that weather patterns and stars in the night sky were appropriate for each depending on where in Middle-earth they were. Tolkien's Middle-earth was a real place, therefore, the characters had to interact with it in real ways.”

Many of Tolkien's drawings were to help him visualise the landscape; be it the Lothlorien or Barad-dur, he drew what he was seeing so that he could then write about it. The land was the critical thing and Tolkien never really drew his characters, largely because he wasn't good at drawing people, but the people were secondary to the land. “I think that is why Tolkien is unsurpassed as a fantasy/sci-fi author, because of the importance of this world-building to his legendarium,” McQuillen says.

Drawing on ideas

Sultana Raza, poet, and an independent scholar who has presented papers related to fantasy (Tolkien) suggested several similarities in ideas in the works of Tolkien and ancient Indian texts. When it came to his art, Tolkien created them from his imagination or, from different sources. For instance, he was a devoted father and would write illustrated letters from Father Christmas to his children. He produced drawings to assuage his kids' fears; like the drawing of an owl, Owlamoo, that one of his sons was scared of. Some, like the Elves of his legendarium, were developed much before he had children. McQuillen explains some of the ideas that inspired Tolkien’s art: “He drew on a lot of early European and Norse/Scandinavian literature for elements in his legendarium: one of the first things he ever wrote of Middle-earth, "West of the Moon, East of the Sun," was influenced by the Norwegian fairytale, ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon.’ He often said that nothing new was really ever written, one just reordered pre-existing elements; like a giant soup or stew and the writer just drew out the elements or ingredients that they wanted to use. Several early European mythologies refer to a land of eternal youth in the west, and I think this may be one of the sources for Aman, or the Blessed Realm of the Valar and Elves.”

Publishing artworks

Some of Tolkien’s illustrations have appeared in the first edition of The Hobbit but the original editions of Lord of the Rings did not have space for full illustrations. In fact, a majority of the works were not seen by the public until Bodleian Library acquired the works after his death. One of the exhibition catalogues notes that the American publisher refused to publish the dust-jacket art saying it was ‘too British.’

Tolkien, the artist

McQuillen talks of Tolkien’s reason for drawing which, according to him. was quite different than, say, Pablo Picasso's. “Art was a tool for him, I think, a step in storytelling rather than a finished, commercial product. That being said, it is interesting to me how 'modern' Tolkien's style was. One might assume that he would produce rather dated, Victorian-looking material, and yet his college-age work is very avant-garde, verging on abstract, and certainly more 'of the moment' and forward-looking rather than retro.” The most important thing that Tolkien's art shows us is how wonderfully visual his imagination was. Even during his school and college years, the drawings he produced reveal a very inspired way of seeing the world, especially the natural world. His landscapes are worlds to enter into rather than just a vista to look at. “I see this creative streak in him as a desire to make places or spaces for others rather than representing the current world in which he lived,” McQuillen explains.

Tolkien art trivia

• His first illustration dated 1915 was The Shores of Faery dated May 1915 which depicted Kor, the city of Elves in Valinor

• Tolkien learned to draw and paint form his mother, and later, at school.