Since the publication of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit in 1937, artists including Tolkien himself have sought to capture aspects of Middle-earth fantasy novels in paintings and drawings. He was followed in his lifetime by artists whose work he liked, such as Pauline Baynes, Mary Fairburn, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, and Ted Nasmith, and by some whose work he rejected, such as Horus Engels for the German edition of The Hobbit. Tolkien had strong views on illustration of fantasy, especially in the case of his own works. His recorded opinions range from his rejection of the use of images in his 1936 essay On Fairy-Stories, to agreeing the case for decorative images for certain purposes, and his actual creation of images to accompany the text in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Commentators including Ruth Lacon and Pieter Collier have described his views on illustration as contradictory, and his requirements as being as fastidious as his editing of his novels.
After Tolkien's death in 1973, many artists have created illustrations of Middle-earth characters and landscapes, in media ranging from Alexander Korotich's scraperboard depictions to Margrethe II of Denmark's woodcut-style drawings, Sergey Yuhimov's Russian Orthodox icon-style representations, and Donato Giancola's neoclassical oil paintings. Peter Jackson's 2001–2003 film trilogy of The Lord of the Rings made use of concept art by John Howe and Alan Lee; the resulting images of Middle-earth and the story's characters have strongly influenced subsequent representations of Tolkien's work. Jenny Dolfen has specialised in making watercolour paintings of The Silmarillion, winning three awards from The Tolkien Society. Graham A. Judd has illustrated his father's book on the Flora of Middle-earth with woodcuts showing both the flowers and the scenes associated with them in the legendarium.
Tolkien's artwork
J. R. R. Tolkien accompanied his Middle-earth fantasy writings with a wide variety of non-narrative materials, including paintings and drawings, calligraphy, and maps. In his lifetime, some of his artworks were included in his novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; others were used on the covers of different editions of these books, and later on the cover of The Silmarillion. Posthumously, collections of his artworks have been published, and academics have begun to evaluate him as an artist as well as an author.
Tolkien's views on illustration
Tolkien held strong opinions on illustrating fantasy, especially of his own works, but his statements made at different times are not easy to reconcile into a single point of view.
Destroy useful ambiguity
In his 1936 essay On Fairy-Stories, Tolkien wrote that "However good in themselves, illustrations do little good to fairy-stories." He argued that by giving somewhat generic descriptions in words, the author leaves freedom for the reader's imagination. The Tolkien scholar Nils Agøy suggests that in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien makes frequent use of ambiguity for exactly this reason. Tolkien's illustrations for The Hobbit provide, in the words of the Tolkien scholars Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull, "backgrounds on which readers can paint their own mental pictures, directed by a text but not constrained by too specific an image".
Could work if well-drawn
The 1938 American edition of The Hobbit was illustrated with five of Tolkien's own watercolour paintings. Tolkien was at that time willing to have images in the actual text of the novel, illustrating specific episodes of the narrative. He commented in a 1938 letter to his American publishers, Houghton Mifflin, who were looking for illustrations for their forthcoming edition of The Hobbit, that they should seek an artist "who can draw [human figures]" as his own drawings of hobbits were "an unsafe guide", some of them "very ill-drawn". He mentions, too, that there could be "special illustrations of episodes" in the story where the hobbit Bilbo might appear wearing boots, which he says Bilbo acquired in Rivendell, but in the other illustrations he should be drawn with bare feet.
Must be in keeping with the text
In 1946, Tolkien voiced his objections to Horus Engels's illustrations for a German edition of The Hobbit. He described the work as having "certain merits", but "too 'Disnified' for my taste: Bilbo with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as a figure of vulgar fun rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think of".
Tolkien felt that the requirements of a good illustration were not the same as for being a respected or fashionable artist. When Allen & Unwin were working with the artist Milein Cosman on illustrations for Farmer Giles of Ham in 1948, Tolkien described the sample drawings as resembling the work of Feliks Topolski or Edward Ardizzone, commenting that he wasn't "much interested in [their] fashionableness". That did not make up, in his opinion, for "their lack of resemblance to their text". He stated, among more detailed objections, that the artist should have located the illustrations in or near Oxfordshire; that the trees were poorly drawn; and that the dragon was "absurd. Ridiculously coy, and quite incapable of performing any of the tasks laid on him by the author." In short, he found Cosman's samples "wholly out of keeping with the style or manner of the text".
By 1949, Allen & Unwin had found another artist to illustrate Farmer Giles of Ham, Pauline Baynes. Tolkien expressed delight at the result, writing that the images were "more than illustrations, they are a collateral theme". He noted his friends' "polite" comment, that "they reduced my text to a commentary on the drawings."
Should "depict the noble and the heroic"
Tolkien met the Dutch artist Cor Blok in 1961. He liked the five paintings that he saw enough to purchase two of them. "Battle of the Hornburg II" hung in the front hall of his house to welcome visitors. "The Dead Marshes" too found a place in his house; Blok later gave Tolkien a third painting, "Dunharrow", out of his 149 The Lord of the Rings works. Tolkien wrote to his publisher, Rayner Unwin, that he found Blok's paintings "most attractive", especially the Hornburg image. He thought the other works "attractive as pictures but bad as illustrations"; he doubted whether any living "artist of talent ... would even try to depict the noble and the heroic", elements that he felt central to his work. All the same, when asked in December 1962 who might be able to illustrate a deluxe edition of The Lord of the Rings (as a set of six volumes), Tolkien proposed Blok and Pauline Baynes. Blok added in 2011 that the 20th century had created two stereotypes of "the noble and the heroic": totalitarian hero-figures such as the "Heroes of Labour" of Stalinist Art, or the "bulging muscles (and breasts)" of the superheroes of comic books. He commented that neither are suitable for illustrating Tolkien, and that the two approaches had made it hard for artists of other sorts to represent heroism, even on "a small scale". The Tolkien scholar Daniel Howick especially admired Blok's "wonderfully atmospheric" painting "Rivendell".
Detail of Cor Blok's painting Battle of the Hornburg II that Tolkien liked enough to purchase. It was the only one of Blok's Middle-earth images that worked for Tolkien as an illustration, as opposed to a stand-alone painting.
Should leave freedom for imagination
Tolkien told Blok that "he was not in favour of illustrated editions". However, they agreed that an illustrator should omit anything non-essential from an image. In a letter to Baynes, who had by then illustrated several of his minor works, Tolkien similarly mentioned his objections to illustration, but stated that a case could be made for "illustration (or decoration!) applied to small things". Agøy comments that Tolkien's remarks to these artists are "not unambiguous", but taken together suggest that he believed that freedom should be left for the reader.
Contradictory opinions
The artist Ruth Lacon argues that Tolkien's actions, preparing illustrations for his own works, conflict with what he wrote about their use. She suggests that images are especially useful in complex texts like The Silmarillion. Pieter Collier, who edited a book of Cor Blok's illustrations for The Lord of the Rings, commented that "Tolkien's criteria for excellence in illustration were as fastidious" as those for selecting "le mot juste in his writing." The scholar of literature Aurore Noury comments that one of the paradoxes around Tolkien is that he hoped his subcreated world would live on after him, but that he imposed strict requirements on anyone who sought to illustrate his novels.
+ Some of Tolkien's views on illustration Style Application Example artists Inaccuratefailing to match text, tone wrong Unusable Horus EngelsMilein Cosman Decorativeattractive but without heroic tone Minor (non-Middle-earth) tales, vistas, maps Pauline BaynesTolkien's own artwork Illustrativewith "noble or awe-inspiring" quality In or alongside the text Margrethe II of DenmarkMary Fairburn
In dialogue with Tolkien: 1937–1973 Tove Jansson, 1962
The Swedish-speaking Finnish author, novelist, painter and illustrator Tove Jansson, who had written and illustrated the Moomin books, illustrated Swedish and Finnish translations of The Hobbit. Among these is a very large Gollum for the 1962 Swedish translation; she had been asked to do the illustrations by the Swedish children's author, Astrid Lindgren. Jansson wanted to avoid any hint of Moomins, but equally did not try to enter the world of Middle-earth, being more interested in the landscapes, writing "The characters are commonplace: dwarfs, goblins, elves, black demigods – but the scenery is seductive in its macabre ferocity." Tolkien was surprised to see a giant monster towering above Bilbo, but realised that the book did not say how small Gollum was. He edited the second edition to state explicitly that Gollum was "a small, slimy creature".
The scholar of literature Björn Sundmark states that Jansson's work helped to define how Middle-earth fantasy could be depicted visually. He adds that the edition with her illustrations was not reprinted for many years, even though reviewers and "Tolkienists" liked Jansson's "expressive" images. Sundmark suggests that the reason was that in the 1960s, a new, more realistic style became the norm for fantasy art.
Mary Fairburn, 1968
In May 1968, the English artist Mary Fairburn sent Tolkien several illustrations of The Lord of the Rings, mostly in coloured ink. He replied that they were "splendid. They are better pictures in themselves and also show far more attention to the text than any that have yet been submitted to me". He added "I am beginning to ... think that an illustrated edition [of The Lord of the Rings] might be a good thing."
The project went no further, as Tolkien, aged 76, injured his leg and was in the process of moving house from Oxford to Bournemouth; and the removals team seriously disorganised his papers. In October 1968 he wrote to Fairburn that his publisher Rayner Unwin would take "some months" to decide whether to publish an illustrated edition of The Lord of the Rings, mentioning that black-and-white illustrations were more likely. She states that she created black-and-white versions of 26 of her paintings, one for each chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring and the first four chapters of The Two Towers, the last being "Treebeard". Fairburn lost many of the illustrations in repeated house moves; nine survive, of which one, a coloured painting of "Galadriel at the Well in Lórien" came into Tolkien's possession. Fairburn's illustrations remained unknown to scholars until 2012; her work was finally published in the Tolkien Calendar 2015.