Wywiad z Johnem D. Rateliffem (I Am Interviewed . . . in Polish)

So, Friday brought a new experience: for the first time in my life, I got mail from Poland.* Enclosed in the parcel were two items I'd been looking forward to: AIGLOS: ALMANACH TOLKIENOWSKI (volume 18, the current issue) and AIGLOS Special Issue #2 (Summer 2012). Unlike, say, Gary Hunnewell, the master of Tolkien fanzine studies, I've had relatively little contact with the burgeoning Tolkien fandom and scholarship in (continental) Europe, especially eastern and southern Europe, where I know just enough to know that interesting things have been going on for quite some time now. So when I was contacted by The Tolkien Section of the Silesian Science-Fiction Club (Sekcja Tolkienowska  Slaskiego Klubu Fantastyki) and asked if I'd do an interview I was pleased to discover they'd even heard of me and my book so far afield (about 5300 miles away). They sent me some questions, I sent in answers, and the results (now translated into Polish) appear on pages 164-169 of the current issue. Here's how the opening paragraph looks (sans the special characters which I can't reproduce on this keyboard):

Wywiad z Johnem D. Rateliffem

John R. Rateliff jest dobrze znanym badaczem tolkienowskim swiazanym z Marquette University, gdzie obronil prace doktorska na temat lorda Dunsany'ego. Na szersze wody swiatowej tolkienistyki wyplynal wraz z publikacja w 2007 roku The History of The Hobbit ['Historii Hobbita']. Wczesniej jednak wspoluczestniczyl w wielu tolkienowskich przedsiewzieciach, miedzy innymi w przygotowaniu zbioru Tolkien's Legendarium. Essays on "The History of Middle-earth" ['Legendarium Tolkiena. Eseje o Historii Srodziemia'].

It's a strange experience seeing yourself described in a language you don't read; I can pick out enough of this to know that this is my mini-bio ("doktorska . . . lorda Dunsany" being a reference to my dissertation of Lord Dunsany). It's stranger still to see your own words and not be able to read them; not remembering exactly what the questions were or what I said in response to them makes the whole piece seem both mine and not-mine at the same time. Interesting experience.

Of course, my piece is far from the only HOBBIT-themed one in this issue; there are reviews of Corey Olsen's and Noble Smith's books, as well as extensive discussion of the Peter Jackson movie. The cartoons scattered through the volume are particularly amusing, since some of them translate extremely well without any need for words (a demonstration of how inconvenient it is for an elf-lord to ride an elk and maintain his dignity) while others are intriguingly elusive (e.g., two elves with I.V.s riding giant snails). There's also a write-up of the Loughborough conference, including a photo of a panel with Verlyn Flieger, Tom Shippey, and two others whom I don't recognize. All in all, the contents look interesting enough that it makes me wish I could read them.

Which is why the other volume included with this one is so welcome: the 'Special Issue' reprints, in English, a number of pieces from earlier volumes. Even on a quick skim I can see one article of particular interest: Tadeusz A. Olszanski's "The First Tolkienists", a look back at the first five critics to publish book-length studies of Tolkien: Carter, Kocher, Kilby, Ready, and Helms. The author notes that Carter and Kocher are readily available in Polish translation, and that he'd been unable to find a copy of Ready at all, so he focuses on Kilby and Helms. I'm looking forward to reading the resulting piece: Kilby remains well-known (both for providing one of the relatively few memoirs of Tolkien and for his role in founding the Wade Collection), while Helms has virtually dropped off the map: I rarely see him cited and think he's more or less vanished from the collective memory. I'm glad to hear Kocher's well-known over there, since I think his is still one of the best books on Tolkien even now, forty-plus years later.

There's also a generous interview section which shows I'm in good company for being a more recent part of that series, with interviews in English with Wayne and Christina, Shippey, Verlyn, Michael Drout, and Alex Lewis (some thirty-six pages in all).

And I have to say the art's pretty good as well, tending more towards a naturalist style with realistic-looking characters rather than a more faerie strangeness often seen in Tolkien-inspired art (the realistic being the approach favored by Tolkien himself). In particular, I think the illustration by 'Kasiopea' on p. 332 of Morwen and young Turin is the best I've ever seen of those two characters, capturing perfectly the proud haughtiness of that pair in their beleaguered days of poverty.

All in all, a nice thing to find in the mailbox on a summer's day. Here's hoping my own piece gets picked up and reprinted in some Special Issue #3 somewhere down the line.

--John R.
current reading: SEASONED TO TASTE by Harry Bauer [1961]
current autobook: Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON, read by Bernard Mayes


*(Even without the return address, I probably cd have guessed this from the huge stamps of Pope John Paul the second)

Tolkien Computer Art

So, I'm on deadline. Hence though I have a number of thing I've been wanting to write up and post about, they'll have to wait until I get done what I have to get done. In the meantime, expect some shorter, lighter pieces.

One such is that I recently picked up the January issue (#91) of IMAGINE FX (subtitled FANTASY AND SCI-FI DIGITAL ART). This is entirely outside my field of expertise and wd normally be outside my field of interest as well, but this issue's theme is illustrating Tolkien's work through digital art.

In addition to the cover art of Gollum and Bilbo (by Woonyoung Jung, an artist I'm not familiar with) there's  (1) an accompanying article about lighting such a scene,  (2) a review-article on Howe and Lee's work for the films (esp. the new film) -- good, but I already knew much of this from other sources, like the recent Weta Workshop book,  (3) a heavily illustrated article about Ilya Nazarov's work for one of the computer games (LORD OF THE RINGS: WAR IN THE NORTH),  (4) a piece by Donato Giancola (whose work I do know, having been impressed by his pieces for the ME:TW collectable card game) showing the steps by which he created a picture of JRRT at work in his study (he gets points for producing an image that Dr. Blackwelder wd be glad to add to his portraiture portfolio; his Tolkien is younger than in the familiar post-LotR photos),  (5) a piece by one Noah Bradley analyzing his sweeping landscape of The White City (Minas Tirith),  (6) a portrait of a Tolkienian elf by Corrado Vanelli,   there's (7) Nacho Molina's wonderful picture of Eowyn and the Witch-King and his step-by-step reconstruction of how he made the image.

Molina's Eowyn, an impressive addition to the already crowded gallery of illustrations of this favorite scene, get my nod for the best piece in the magazine. His Eowyn is both fully clothed and sensibly armored, two basics a surprising number of artists who illustrate the scene fall down on. I hope this image gets wider circulation than just this issue of this magazine; it's more deserving of becoming a poster than many I've seen.

Here's a link to the image (in somewhat sharper focus than the version appearing in the magazine):

http://www.art-spire.com/en/illustration/nacho-molina-eowyn-vs-the-witch-king/

--John R.
current reading: LORD HALIFAX'S GHOST BOOK [1936], with an egregious introduction by Colin Wilson.

Tolkien-inspired Stained Glass

So, it's no surprise that among the many artistic renditions of scenes in Tolkien's work, someone would come along and do some stained glass designs. I think it cd be argued that some of Tolkien's own work wd lend itself well to stained glass adaptation: I've always wanted a stained glass version of Bilbo Comes to the Hut of the Raft-elves, for instance, and a lot of the heraldic devices associated with the SILMARILLION wd make good stained-glass rondels.

Here's the link to Jian Guo's pieces, courtesy of Janice

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/04/jian-guo-lord-of-the-rings-stained-glass-art_n_1855606.html?utm_hp_ref=books

Of the five pieces linked to here (I'm not clear on whether this is the whole set or merely a representative sample), "Rest in Gildor's Forest" is notable for depicting a scene we rarely see illustrated -- though it's also the only one in which I spotted a factual error (four hobbits where there shd only be three). The five pieces, in their proper sequence, are

"Birthday Party of Baggins"

"Rest in Gildor's Forest"

"Deep Into Moria"

"Welcome from Lothlorien"

"Gates of Argonath"

Given that all these fall within the first volume of LotR, I wonder if there'll be a second and third set to cover THE TWO TOWERS and RETURN OF THE KING. I wdn't be surprised if these five aren't at some point made into posters (a la the old "The Journey Begins", with its almost black-light vividness of colors).

In any case, an interesting example of what Tolkien, in his Letter to Waldman, called "other hands".

--John R.

THE ART OF THE HOBBIT

So, the second new Tolkien book to arrive this past week was THE ART OF 'THE HOBBIT', by Wayne and Christina. I'd known this one was in the works for a few months, and even got to see a preview of some of its highlights this summer. It's a beautiful book, and one that anyone interested in Tolkien, Tolkien's art, or in THE HOBBIT, will want to get their hands on it as soon as possible (I got mine via amazon.co.uk). Their previous JRRT: ARTIST & ILLUSTRATOR [1995] was a major work that shd be on every Tolkien scholar's shelf, and this is a worthy, if more narrowly focused, successor.

Basically they've brought together every known illustration, map, or rough sketch Tolkien made for THE HOBBIT,* arranged them into order of where they fit into the story, and added a page or so describing each piece or set of closely related pieces. One particularly nice feature is that they've been able to use multiple gatefolds to bring together sequences, where Tolkien went through a series of attempts to capture a particular scene, like The Hill at Hobbiton, or the Elvenking's Gate, or Smaug flying 'round the Mountain.

I did my best to demonstrate the importance of Tolkien's art to the story in THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT, but there I only had twelve plates and two frontispieces to convey what they've used 144 pages to get across. And it's wonderful to see (particularly for those of failing eyesight, like myself -- the community of Tolkien fans and scholars alike being an aging one) the pieces are, as Wayne & Christina point out, "reproduced . . . as large as possible" [p.17], rather than shrunk down (as I needed to do to 'stuff every rift with ore', as Jn Keats wd put it). It helps that this is an oversize square-format book (ten & a half by ten & a half inches) in a handsome slipcase, resembling the original edition of PICTURES BY TOLKIEN more than it does ARTIST & ILLUSTRATOR.

The results are, I repeat, wonderful. Tolkien didn't have much confidence in himself as an artist, but like Thurber and Lofting (fellow artistic autodidacts) his work is distinctive and instantly recognizable; it's part of the tales.

And this is a definitive collection: there are a few pictures here even I've not seen before -- for example, the more detailed picture of Elrond's house [#18], or the rough sketch of Eagles' Eyrie [#40], or the first version of The Three Trolls Are Turned To Stone [#14] (I find I prefer the trolls' faces here to the final version). And many more here reproduced in sharper detail than ever before -- e.g., all the dwarven activity at The Back Door [#69]. Others I've seen at some point but not paid much attention to; here they stand out much more when placed in the right context (like #35: The Misty Mountains, which had previously been tucked at the end of the index of ARTIST & ILLUSTRATOR [H-S#200]).

This book is relatively text-light, compared with ARTIST & ILLUSTRATOR, which is as it shd be: here the focus shd all be on presenting Tolkien's art as clearly as possible. Their introduction does a good job of covering a great deal of territory in relatively little space: only eighteen pages to discuss the origins to the book, explain how the art came to be created, and comment on the "rich visual experience" of the results. I particularly admired the economy with which they addressed various complex and thorny issues -- as, for example, dating when Tolkien began and finished the story:

". . . around 1930 (the evidence is too contradictory to give a precise date), [Tolkien] began to write [The Hobbit]" [p.9]

". . . It may have reached substantially its published form by the time Tolkien lent it to C. S. Lewis around the start of 1933, or it may be that its final chapters . . . were not composed until Allen & Unwin showed an interest in the work in 1936" [p. 10]

--While I think the 1930 date is pretty firm, that's a great way of getting a lot of information judiciously into v. little space (even the choice of the word write is significant, given speculation about oral tales); likewise, they acknowledge but do not take a position re. the Carpenter hiatus. Anyone who's delved into the complexity of the evidence re. these two points can appreciate how difficult it is to clearly explain them without oversimplification: here I think there's just the right amount of simplification for this context (where the emphasis is, and shd be, all on the art).

Finally, I'm envious of one thing. They've pulled off something I wanted to do in RETURN TO BAG-END but in the end wasn't able to: assemble all eight known pictures of Bilbo** onto one spread. In my case, I simply ran out of space, and in the end agreed w. my editor at HarperCollins that it'd be better to include two more new pieces rather than devote a page to reproduction of pieces already appearing elsewhere in the book, esp. given how small the eight pieces wd have to be to all fit onto one (nine-inch by six-inch) plate. Freed of that restriction, Wayne & Christina reproduce enlargements of them all. Looking at these side-by-side is illuminating: it's clear that Tolkien had a v. clear image of what Bilbo looked like; despite his difficulty with drawing faces there's a recognizable likeness in BB's features in the majority of the portraits. It's also interesting to note that Bilbo wears some sort of footwear in four of the eight pictures (Tolkien having meant to insert a passage re. Bilbo's getting shod at Rivendell before heading up into the mountains but never having gotten around to doing so). Well done!

--John R.

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

*with the possible exception of the tracings of the two hasty sketches of Gandalf's hat that appear in the end of the new one-volume H.o.H. [p.901]

**at the doorstep of Bag End, inside Bag-End smoking, in the bushes by the trolls, barrel-riding (two images from different versions of this scene), bowing to Smaug (in silhouette), resting in the Eyrie, and in the sketch he drew for Houghton Mifflin, this last having first been reproduced in H.o.H.).

The New Arrival: A TOLKIEN TAPESTRY

The New Arrival: A TOLKIEN TAPESTRY

So, the day before I left for my trip, the mail brought the latest addition to my Tolkien shelves, Cor Blok's A TOLKIEN TAPESTRY: PICTURES TO ACCOMPANY THE LORD OF THE RINGS. I've already expressed my opinion of Blok's artwork in an earlier post; this deeper exploration confirms me in the opinion that the story behind the picture-cycle is more interesting that the art itself. Imagine what it'd be like to discover that Barbara Remington, in addition to her gosh-awful covers for the Ballantine Tolkiens, had carried on for several years creating over a hundred more pictures in a similar style, only now to be revealed in their glorious awfulness. That's essentially what we've got with this book, except that it's the artist who did the Dutch paperback covers instead of the psychedelic American ones.

What we have here are a hundred and forty pictures, created between 1958 and 1961, retelling THE LORD OF THE RINGS (more or less*) in faux-naif art. I don't think anyone has done this extensive a series, at least not that I've seen assembled in sequence. Oddly enough I thought the back cover of the dust jacket, which creates a mosaic of some thirty pieces seen all at once side-by-side in a great collage, was the most effective presentation. The fact that there are so many pieces in this book means that some scenes that never get illustrated appear here -- Grima spitting, the bath at Crickhollow, the Fellowship being led while blindfolded in Lorien, Nob helping Merry (the only depiction of him I remember ever seeing), or Bill Ferny being hit by the apple. But Blok's art is such that he provides not just a truly inept Gollum (he looks like a splay-footed duck) but possibly the worst Goldberry ever, a truly hideous Galadriel, and worst of the whole lot a gaggle of Ents looking like walking cigars festooned with green rot-fungus.

The most valuable thing about this book is the Tolkien letter reproduced on page 6 (and a paragraph from another quoted on page 7; Blok also summarizes two things Tolkien told him regarding Blok's art on pages 15 and 25 (that he did not want a definitive illustrated edition that wd associate his work with any particular artist [e.g., Carroll & Tenniel], and that Blok had completely misrepresented Gollum by forgetting he was of hobbit-kin).

Blok's commentary is quite interesting, both in his history of the project** and his pointing out specific details in individual paintings -- I'd missed, for example, the fact that Gollum always appears in silhouette, with no refining detail. Reading this in conjunction with looking at the pictures, I'm forced to conclude that Blok is an Erol Otus -- his art only looks inept, and actually is the result of a highly trained artist deliberately choosing that effect -- what Tolkien called elsewhere "the modern mode in which those who can draw try to conceal it."***

In the end there truly is no arguing about taste. And I'm glad that those who find some merit in Cor Blok's work have revived and printed it (and doing a v. gd job of it too, I might add****); it's an interesting project, and worth preserving. But I hope the year after next's Tolkien calendar features somebody whose work isn't just occasionally interesting in a weird and freakish way but actually art I'd enjoy looking at for a whole month at a time per image. Say, a Hobbit calendar using the artwork in Wayne & Christina's new book. Or I'd be happy for an entire calendar illustrated by Tolkien's beautiful calligraphy, given my druthers.

In the meantime, we get Howard the Gollum in Gormenghast.

--JDR

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

*some crucial scenes are missing -- for example, Blok seems to lose interest in the latter part of the story: there are only two pictures of minor scenes following the Ring's destruction, one of Gimli and Legolas in the Glittering Caves and one of hobbit-shirriffs accompanying the four travellers.

**his 'Barbarusia' project, which preceded his LotR, was a sort of Islandia for artists; his 'Iron Parachute' which was to follow is a massive still-incomplete graphic novel with Joycean prose (think CERBERUS THE ARDVARK issued as a single volume all at one time but written in a style of FINNEGANS WAKE word-slush).

***JRRT to R. Unwin, December 1965 (cf. LETTERS OF JRRT). Was Tolkien thinking about Blok? No way to tell . . .

****I only found one likely glitch: I don't have a copy of LotR with me to check this, and it's always dangerous quoting from memory, but I'm pretty sure the quote on page 74 doesn't apply to the Inn at Bree but instead to the House in Crickhollow.

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.

A Good Way to Spend Forty Thousand Pounds

So, thanks to Mike Foster (thanks Mike), I learned today that an original Tolkien drawing, of his Aunt Jane's farm where he wrote the first poem in his legendarium (about Earendil, in 1914), is currently being auctioned off by Sotheby's on behalf of his brother Hilary's heirs.

Here's the link:

http://www.sothebys.com/app/live/lot/LotDetail.jsp?lot_id=159566775

Quite a nice piece, but given the current state of the exchange rate (the average estimated going price of 40k pounds equals about 67k dollars right about now), and the general rotten state of the economy, I don't think they'll get too many bidders from over here, where most of the Tolkien collectors are. On the other hand, I just read today that England's the one industrialized country whose recovery from the Depression is even slower than ours, so who knows?

Seeing this does give rise to fantasies though of entering into a Tolkien Tontine, where the picture gets passed around every month and the last surviving member gives it to one of the major Tolkien collections, either Marquette or the Wade.

--John R.

"Attributed" to Tolkien

So, the next-to-last book I'm expecting from those I ordered at Kalamazoo has now arrived: Seth Lerer's award-winning CHILDREN'S LITERATURE: A READER'S HISTORY FROM AESOP TO HARRY POTTER [2008]. Not only does this look to be interested and informative, but it devotes part of its chapter on "Fairy Tale Philology" to a discussion of Tolkien's works. What particularly grabbed my attention as I was skimming through it in the bookroom, though, is the reproduction of a full-page piece of art on page 226. This is a very detailed drawing of the world of Norse mythology: at the top is the World Tree ("Yggdrasil, the world-ash") with "Ratatosk" and "The Eagle". Below this comes the middle world, with the dome of the sky held aloft by four figures; to one side is a lean wolf chasing the sun and to the other another pursuing the moon. Below is "Nidhogg, the dragon", perching in the tree's roots, and at the bottom amid swirls of mist "Niflheim, the realm of Hel".

According to Lerer, this piece (taken from E. V. Gordon's AN INTRODUCTION TO OLD NORSE [1927]) is "Attributed to J. R. R. Tolkien" (caption on p. [226]). In the accompanying discussion, he is even more emphatic. Speaking of the Juniper Tree in Grimms' story of the same name clapping its hands in joy, he asks "How can we not see the great ents embodied here? How can we not see, too, the great tree Yggdrasil of Old Norse mythology -- the tree that spans the range from hell to Middle Earth, the tree that Tolkien himself illustrated in a line drawing in a textbook by his colleague E. V. Gordon, AN INTRODUCTION TO OLD NORSE? How can we not recall the image of the Tree of Tales itseld, where history is "ramified," where life branches off?" (Lerer, p. 225)

The problem is that this picture doesn't really resemble Tolkien's work at all. At best you could say that the long lean wolves and the tree's graceful limbs are vaguely reminiscent of some of Pauline Baynes' work, but not Tolkien's own.

Nor does it bear Tolkien's initials anywhere that I can see.

Nor is it attributed to Tolkien in Gordon's original book (in my copy, a trade paperback of the 2nd edition as revised by A. R. Taylor, this piece appears on page 196). Gordon's book includes a half dozen or so illustrations -- most famously the drawing of Hrolf Kraki's Hall that helped inspired Tolkien's picture of Beorn's Hall in THE HOBBIT -- but none of them is credited to a specific artist. Indeed, in ARTIST & ILLUSTRATOR [1995] Wayne & Christina even attribute the mead-hall drawing to Gordon himself (p 122 & 124), although so far as I can tell this is just an educated guess on their part (i.e., if any documentation exists to confirm their ascription, I'm not aware of it). Now Lerer has gone further and attributed another of the drawings to Tolkien himself, without offering any explanation of why he thinks this piece is by Tolkien -- not even a passing reference or footnote.

Without any evidence to support the claim, and the strikingly non-Tolkienian nature of the artwork itself (esp. when compared with the work JRRT was doing circa 1927, like THE BOOK OF ISHNESS and ROVERANDOM), this seems to be a false ascription. But I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has seen it before. Does it originate with Lerer -- i.e., is the "attributed" in the caption on page 226 no more than a reference back to his own assertion on page 225? -- or is he picking it up from another source? If he has a source, what is it? Is it reliable or otherwise? Given the nature of false information to linger on and on no matter how many times it's been refuted, I worry that once such a claim has been made it'll pop up from time to time no matter what the evidence or lack of it.

--John R.

current reading: ARDA RECONSTRUCTED by Douglas Kane, ALL WHAT JAZZ? by Philip Larkin.

UPDATE (Th. June 4th):
I've gone back and corrected one error and one typo; thanks to Jason for pointing them out in the comments.