Illustrating Middle-earth

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, and later of The Hobbit, 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.

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.

[1][2] 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.

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 expressed delight at the result, writing that the images were "more than illustrations, they are a collateral theme", explaining that "they reduced my text to a commentary on the drawings.

[7] "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.

[9] 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.

[10] 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".

"[9] 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.

[16] The scholar of literature Björn Sundmark states that Jansson's work helped to define how Middle-earth fantasy could be depicted visually.

"[13] 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.

Fairburn lost many of the illustrations in repeated house moves; nine survive,[e] of which one, a coloured painting of "Galadriel at the Well in Lórien" came into Tolkien's possession.

[20] Pauline Baynes created the illustrations for some of Tolkien's minor works, such as the 1949 Farmer Giles of Ham and the 1962 The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.

[22][23][24][25] The scholar of English literature Paul Tankard comments that "Tolkien clearly admired Pauline Baynes' work, in certain ways and for certain purposes: for illustrations to his slighter and non-Middle-earthly tales, for vistas and for maps—but not for inside and alongside of the narrative of The Lord of the Rings.

"[13] In short, Tolkien liked her work and found it usefully decorative, but felt that it lacked the "noble or awe-inspiring" quality that Middle-earth illustrations needed, giving as an instance "her ridiculous picture of the dragon" in Farmer Giles of Ham.

[29] The Japanese artist Ryûichi Terashima [ja] (寺島竜一) made a set of drawings to illustrate Teiji Seta's 1965 translation of The Hobbit.

[32] According to the artist Tony DiTerlizzi in the Los Angeles Times, Sendak sent two drawings to Tolkien, the one that survives and one of Mirkwood's wood-elves dancing by moonlight.

[35][36] Belomlinsky stated that his Bilbo character was based on the actor Yevgeny Leonov, who he described as "good-natured, plump, with hairy legs.

[38] In 1979, the Czech artist and animator Jiří Šalamoun [cz], known for his children's television series Maxipes Fík starring a cartoon dog,[39] illustrated Frantisek Vrba's translation of The Hobbit.

Šalamoun adapted his usual children's style to what he thought would suit the book; Janka Kaščáková comments that the result is "rather far ... from Tolkien's original.

According to the Tolkien scholar Martin Simonson, the woodcuts "combine accurate representations of the morphological features of most of the plants under study with symbolically rendered scenes from the legendarium, and they thus manage to convey the mixed essence of the book as such: art and science.

[56] LaSala suggests that Giancola's "The Tower of Cirith Ungol", with an Orc tormenting a naked Frodo, could almost be by the Anglo-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), known for his depictions of the supernatural.

[66] Eißmann illustrated Timothy Furnish's 2016 book High Towers and Strong Places: A Political History of Middle-earth in a way that, in Mike Foster's opinion, had been influenced by Peter Jackson's films.