The New Arrival (2017 Tolkien Calendar)

So, I've known for a while that this coming year's Tolkien calendar would be one of the good ones, featuring Tolkien's own art. Now that it's arrived, it lives up to all expectations -- beautiful reproductions of all nine of his full-page black and white drawings for THE HOBBIT, plus the half-page Mirkwood halftone. I was surprised to see a piece I was pretty sure I'd never seen before (and I've seen a lot of Hobbit art): a black-and-white drawing version of the November image, "Conversation with Smaug".

Turns out I was only surprised because I skipped right to the art and jumped over the v. nice introduction by Alan Lee,* who explains that two of the illustrations are 'new pen-and-ink renditions' of two of Tolkien's watercolors, redrawn by one Nicolette Caven esp. for this calendar. I don't know Caven's work otherwise, but she did a fine job here.**

All in all, an excellent calendar, and one I'm looking forward to hanging up up in my office come the new year.


Also newly arrived is the latest of the C. S. Lewis-as-detective books from Kel Richards. The fourth so far, THE SINISTER STUDENT, which I find I've taken to calling in my head 'Murder at the Inklings'. It repeats the pattern of the first three: from what little I've read of it so far it's notable mainly for including a fictional meeting of the Inklings early on: Lewis, Warnie, Tolkien, Coghill, Fox, and latecomer Dyson, as well as series character Tom Morris and the student of the title, one Auberon Willesden (a modernist who's come so he can feel superior). Tolkien reads them the last chapter of THE HOBBIT. It's rather surprising that Havard isn't there, but then the real-life Inklings and Inklings-as-chacters in Richard's books has always been a casual fit (for example, he calls Warnie 'The Major' throughout, though he was still Captain Lewis before his WW II service).

More on this one when I've had a chance to read it, if more seems merited.

--John R.

current reading
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF CABAL by Jonathan Howard (having now reached about the mid-point)


*Lee traces influence on Tolkien as an artist from Jennie Harbour, Kay Nielsen, Arthur Rackham, Wm Morris, other Pre-Raphaelites, and, rather surprisingly, Rudyard Kipling (one of those many English writers deft with little drawings, like GKG and CSL).

** the other redrawn piece is "Rivendell" (for March).
All five of Tolkien's watercolors for THE HOBBIT are included, but four of them are shrunk down to quarter-page size, leaving only one (Conversation w. Smaug) for full-page full-color glory.

In Praise of (Other People's) Basements

So, we don't have basements, or attics, where I come from. And, since moving up north (and later west), I've discovered that the nice thing about basements is they Accumulate Stuff. And, at certain intervals, the urge comes to clean out significant amounts of said stuff. And thus, a friend last night gave me a bunch of old calendars he thought I'd like.

Old Tolkien calendars.

As in, the 1974 Tolkien calendar, the first (I think) with Tolkien's own art.

As in the 1975 Tim Kirk calendar, which I don't think I've ever even actually seen before -- I've seen the art, or most of it anyway, but don't recall seeing the calendar itself.

Add to that the Hildebrant calendars from 1976, 1977, and 1978 (one or two of which I have, or at least had at one point -- not sure if they survived the house or not). The Bakshi calendar of 1979 with the movie art. The 1980 'Great Illustrators' calendar, with its hilariously, famously bad picture of the death of Boromir based in equal parts on images of St. Sebastien and the Pieta.

Living down in Arkansas as I did, I don't think I had the chance to buy a Tolkien calendar for myself until I discovered Land of Legend, the Zaentz marketing company for items centered on the movie (like the Lord of the Nazgul piggy bank), along with a few other interesting items -- such as Tolkien calendars, Anne Etkins' little book, et al.*

So now I'm going to get out all my old calendars that have survived time, decay, and many many moves, and introduce them to their new friends. And find a new home for them all, in the box room.

Thanks Jeff!

--JDR

*this wd have been 'long about '78.

P.S.: The Wife Says: Thanks, Jeff.

New Tolkien Calendar

So, today I finally managed to pick up next year's Tolkien Calendar, the second in a row with Cor Blok's pug-ugly art. The most interesting part is the 'A Tolkien Tapestry' centerfold, arranging dozens of his LotR illustrations into sequence in tiny thumbnail format. The actual monthly displays give us more of his signature pieces, such as most of his characters being armless, and Gollum-as-a-duck, which sounds like a joke but unfortunately isn't. There are some odd choices of composition as well -- has anyone else ever devoted a painting to Grima spitting? (cf the one for October). I hear there's a book due out soon explaining how he came to do this project, Tolkien's response to it (or what parts of it he saw), &c -- all of which actually sounds more interesting than the art itself. Which is, as I might have said, pug-ugly.

I did have an amusing exchange with the sales clerk at Barnes & Noble when I bought it that went something like this.

He: oh, Tolkien calendar.

Me: yes. Tolkien's said to have seen and actually approve some of the art.

He (after long, considering pause): perhaps what Tolkien saw isn't these pieces . . .

Me: or perhaps Tolkien was a kind-hearted man.

--John R.

current reading: THE STAR BEAST by Rbt. A. Heinlein (just finished)

THE ZERO STONE by Andre Norton.*

*probably my favorite book before I read LotR.

The New Arrival: Pug-Ugly

So, Thursday brought the new (next year's) Tolkien calendar in the mail. I'd had to order it from amazon.com, since they're getting harder and harder to find in the bookstores these days. And a good thing, too, since if I'd seen it first I might have had second thoughts. Suffice it to say there have been great Tolkien calendars in the past (those featuring Tolkien's own art), bad Tolkien calendars (e.g., the Brothers Hildebrandt offerings), and the hilariously inept (the so-called 'Great Illustrators' calendar [1980?])

And then there's this. This year's calendar is illustrated by Cor Blok,* a Dutch artist now in his mid-seventies who has the unusual distinction of having shown his works to Tolkien himself, during a visit to Oxford in August 1961. To me Blok's work looks like a deliberate and unsuccessful attempt to capture a naif primitive style, screened through the pyschodelia that was briefly popular for science fiction and fantasy book covers back in the '60s and early '70s (cf. Barbara Remington's covers for the Ballantine LotR and E. R. Eddisons, or Bob Pepper's work for the Adult Fantasy Series). So I'm astonished to learn that Tolkien apparently liked them. Indeed, he liked them so much that he bought two of them**and accepted a third as a gift from the artist, and apparently went so far as to frame two of the three. This is all the more surprising, given how prickly Tolkien cd be about artists attempting to illustrate his work (he once famously described Pauline Baynes' Gollum as looking like the Michelin Tire Man -- and this was by an artist he liked) and the fact that Blok makes no attempt to be factually accurate: he portrays Gollum as a kind of giant duck*** and has Eowyn stab the witch-king in the lips with a needle-thin spear. The overall effect is both comic and weird, as if Jay Ward's Bullwinkle tried to reproduce some medieval Flemish art.

The best of these pieces are the large-scale battle-scenes, such as The Battle of the Hornburg (August) and Frodo's Vision from Amon Hen (April), which in their crowded muddles echo Brueghel (esp. his Triumph of Death) and create a sort of Garden of Earthly Delights -like creepiness. And he's at his worst with any small-scale scene which involves depiction of actual characters, like the laughably amateurish March of the Ents (May). It would be hard to imagine a worse Ent: I think Blok has probably claimed the all-time-worst prize in this category.

Ironically enough, the lengthy essay by the artist that fills the first few pages of this calendar, "Pictures to Accompany a Great Story", is far more interesting than the art itself. In the essay, Blok gives a brief overview of his career, explains how he came to create his Tolkien art (more than a hundred pieces, all in the period 1958-1962), describes his meeting with Tolkien, and provides a brief technical explanation of how he creates his effects.

From this account, it's clear that Blok was a kind of kindred spirit to Tolkien in one very important and unusual way: just as Tolkien created invented languages set in his own subcreated world, starting in his late teens Blok began to create art from his imaginary country of Barbarusia ("invented to provide the setting for a fictional history of art running from Palaeolithic cave paintings to a local version of 20th century Futurism"). That is, he worked to develop his own distinct style to reflect what the art of this imaginary European country might have looked like. And it was on this Barbarusian art that Blok drew when he turned to painting scenes from Tolkien. The Brontes wrote their shared-world stories, Tolkien created his vocabularies, and Blok painted his Barbarusian art: all differing expressions of a similar impulse.

Perhaps it's better to simply try to enjoy these pieces -- either as art or as outstanding pieces of dadaesque folly, depending on how they take you -- than as anything actually illustrating Tolkien's story. Certainly this is how Tolkien himself took them, writing the he found them "attractive as pictures, but bad as illustrations" (JRRT to RU). Blok, for his part, admits that he gets plenty of details wrong but falls back on the argument that "There is a distinction, after all, between depicting and describing . . . This is why I refer to my work on The Lord of the Rings as 'accompanying' rather than 'illustrating' the story." and again "My pictures try to re-tell parts of the written narrative by means of pictorial signs. They are not projections of whatever images Tolkien's text conjured up before my mind's eye. They are pictographs, not photographs".

In short, these are the visual equivalent to music 'inspired by' a poem or story; they have no real value as illustrations but stand or fall as pure art. That's probably why I, personally, find so little value in the result. But, as a wise man once said, your milage may vary.

--John R.

......................

*I first became aware of Blok's work through four paintings reproduced in REALMS OF TOLKIEN: IMAGES OF MIDDLE-EARTH [1996], the second of two art collections from HarperCollins that came out in the mid-ninties; the one-page artist's bio on Blok in the back quotes from two of Tolkien's letters to him. I was incredulous even then that Tolkien wd have liked this stuff, but the evidence seems too solid to doubt.

**"The Battle of the Hornburg", reproduced here as the illustration for August, and what Blok calls a version of "The Dead Marshes". The picture Blok gave him as a present was of "Dunharrow"; the two Tolkien had framed were "Dunharrow" and "Helm's Deep" (i.e., "The Battle of the Hornburg").

***in the illustration for June I just assumed he had a liripipe (a la Baynes' Smith), odd though that wd be; but the illustrations for October and November makes his giant-duck shape (complete with bill and big duck feet) irrefutable.