![\""Tolkien:](\"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/picTolkien173439c_0007.jpg\")
<\/a>See for yourself in \u201cTolkien: Maker of Middle-earth,\u201d<\/a> organized by Bodleian Libraries at Britain\u2019s University of Oxford and on view at New York City\u2019s Morgan Library & Museum from January 25 to May 12, 2019. The exhibition offers 117 objects\u2014family photographs and memorabilia, Tolkien\u2019s original illustrations, maps, draft manuscripts, and designs related to \u201cThe Hobbit,\u201d published 1937, \u201cThe Lord of the Rings\u201d (1954-55), and \u201cThe Silmarillion,\u201d published posthumously in 1977.<\/p>\n Tolkien was orphaned by age 12, served in the First World War, and rose to become an Oxford don and renowned scholar of old and middle English, but he is most remembered for his epic fantasy novels.<\/p>\n The maps seem integral to Tolkien\u2019s development of the tales, to his laying out the travels at the center of his stories and considering how long they would take his characters. The exhibition includes \u201cthe first Silmarillion map,\u201d with characters and places and rivers marked in red and black ink on an unused page from an examination booklet from the University of Leeds, where Tolkien taught from 1920 to 1925. He kept updating it, adding annotations in pencil, until at least 1930.<\/p>\n As Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull recount in their 2012 book \u201cThe Art of The Hobbit,\u201d the first illustrations Tolkien provided his publisher were redrawn from his \u201chome manuscript,\u201d a much amended copy of \u201cThe Hobbit\u201d as he began telling it to his children in the late 1920s and then, between 1933 and \u201936, shared with friends and acquaintances, until it came to the attention of Dagnall.<\/p>\n \u201cI do not remember a time when I was not building it,\u201d Tolkien (1892-1973) would later say of his tales of Middle-earth.<\/p>\n Tolkien\u2019s talent with drawing and painting remains surprising. It\u2019s still not that common for a good writer to be good at art too, even among children\u2019s book illustrators or cartoonists.<\/p>\n During Tolkien\u2019s undergraduate studies at Oxford, he illustrated Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Finnish \u201cKalevala\u201d and drew from his imagination. Beginning in the 1920s, he wrote and illustrated annual Christmas stories for his four children.<\/p>\n After Tolkien\u2019s publisher liked his first batch of \u201cHobbit\u201d illustrations, Tolkien sent more\u2014trolls, Bilbo Babbins\u2019s hall at Bag-End, the lightning of a winter storm crackling along a mountain path.<\/p>\n His vision of Middle-earth recalls the landscapes of his youth in rural England\u2014Berkshire houses and fields, his cousins\u2019 garden, the rocky Cornwall coast. A 1911 visit to the Swiss Alps shaped his spiky mountains. His eagle was based on a painting of a young golden eagle by Alexander Tornburn in Lord Lilford\u2019s 1891 \u201cBirds of the British Islands.\u201d His drawing of trolls was inspired by Jennie Harbor\u2019s illustration of \u201cHansel and Gretel.\u201d<\/p>\n Tolkien\u2019s stylization calls to mind Art Nouveau stained glass, turn-of-the-20th-century illustration, Aubrey Beardsley. Later, one would find echoes of his black and white ink drawings for the first British edition of \u201cThe Hobbit\u201d in early illustrations for Dungeons & Dragons players manuals.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are all obviously defective,\u201d Tolkien wrote of his second batch of \u201cHobbit\u201d illustrations. But his publisher continued to support his art, and in fact invited him in February or March 1937 to illustrate the book\u2019s dust jacket. His breathtaking view shows a road running straight up the spine, through symmetrical green woods and blue-black snowcapped mountain peaks. In the original artwork, in the exhibition, Tolkien had a red dragon and sun in the sky. But in the left margin, his publisher, ever conscious of the cost of adding another color, penciled \u201cIgnore red\u201d and painted them over with white.<\/p>\n After the British edition appeared, his American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Company, sought to add color illustrations by an American artist for the U.S. edition. But at the suggestion of Tolkien\u2019s British publisher, Tolkien himself ended up painting small watercolors of Rivendell\u2019s rushing river canyon, the rolling green hills of Hobbiton and the dragon Smaug, contentedly wrapped around his horde of gold.<\/p>\n Tolkien struggled with rendering figures and could be clumsy with animals, which he concealed by generally making them small. His talent is for epic, stylized, mystical landscapes\u2014banded by roads that call you to adventure.<\/p>\n Related:<\/strong> Interview: Guy Gavriel Kay On His New Novel \u2018A Brightness Long Ago,\u2019 Tolkien, Reimagining History<\/a><\/p>\n If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n In the fall of 1936, as the first edition of \u201cThe Hobbit\u201d was in production, its author, J.R.R. Tolkien, gave his publisher a series of maps that he\u2019d drawn to augment the adventure tale. The publisher, Allen & Unwin, asked that he simplify the shading and colors to be reproduced more economically in just two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11675,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,107,115],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11654"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11654"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11679,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11654\/revisions\/11679"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>
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