Lord of the Rings

The J.R.R. Tolkien Calendar 1974 was the last calendar to be produced while Tolkien was still alive. After his death in September 1973, Rayner Unwin, Chairman of the publishers Allen & Unwin, proposed to Tolkien’s son, Christopher, that the calendars should continue. Christopher Tolkien and Unwin collaborated closely over the next four years on the selection and presentation of pictures. No calendar was produced for 1975, but one was released the following year. It was called The Hobbit Calendar 1976, and it focused, as its name suggested, on illustrations made to accompany The Hobbit. The five watercolour paintings that Tolkien created for The Hobbit (as seen in the 1973 calendar) were once again reproduced in this calendar, but, for the remaining seven months, H.E. Riddett was invited to colour Tolkien’s original black-and-white pen and ink illustrations, which we haven’t yet seen. Since then, these coloured versions have appeared elsewhere, such as the deluxe editions of the book. I will also include the original line drawings that Tolkien drew, for comparison.

In the summer of 1930, when J.R.R. Tolkien, the Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College at Oxford, was marking School Certificate papers, he idly jotted down on a blank sheet one of the most famous opening lines of any book: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ Having imagined the word ‘hobbit’ on the spot, Tolkien asked himself what sort of creature a hobbit might be, but he didn’t go any further than that at the time. Later that year (probably during the Christmas break, when he had no teaching duties), he started a story about a stay-at-home little person who unexpectedly is asked to leave the safety of his daily routine and go off on an adventure.

Tolkien seems to have devised the story of The Hobbit in stages. He made many promising beginnings to stories during his life, but most were abandoned after a short time. Unusually, he kept returning to this one. As a busy lecturer, tutor, and administrator, he rarely had time for creative writing during term time, so most of his work on The Hobbit happened in spurts during the school holidays over the next two years. He would often read the next part of Bilbo’s adventures to his children after evening tea, simply to amuse and entertain them.

The earliest days of The Hobbit are still shrouded somewhat in mystery, but it seems to have reached a form that Tolkien considered satisfactory around the start of 1933, whereupon he lent his ‘home manuscript’, as he called it, to his good friend C.S. Lewis. Tolkien seems to have made no effort to find a publisher, but between 1933 and 1936, he lent his reading copy to various friends and acquaintances in his literary circle until at last, by some combination of events, it came to the attention of Susan Dagnall, an assistant at the publisher George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Impressed by what she read, she convinced Tolkien that The Hobbit ought to be published. He revised and finished the text and then formally submitted it to Allen & Unwin in October 1936.

Stanley Unwin passed the manuscript on to his ten-year-old son, Rayner Unwin, to read and write a report on, since he believed that children were the best judges of what made good children’s books. Rayner, as a test reader for the firm, was paid one shilling for each written report. He enjoyed the book and wrote a positive review. ‘[It was] not a very good piece of literary criticism,’ Rayner later said of the report, ‘but in those days, no second opinion was needed; if I said it was good enough to publish, it was published.’ Rayner Unwin’s enthusiasm for the manuscript decided the matter, and The Hobbit was accepted for publication within two months.

In his review, Rayner Unwin had said: ‘This book, with the help of maps, does not need any illustrations,’ and at first Tolkien and his publisher seem to have agreed with him. The Hobbit was to have five maps, which, with one exception, would trace Bilbo’s journey across the wild lands east of his home to the Lonely Mountain. But during the course of the book’s production, when financial constraints forced the reduction of the number of maps from five to two, Tolkien decided that the book would also benefit from the inclusion of illustrations. He had included several pictures in his ‘home manuscript’ (essentially a reading copy that he lent to various friends and acquaintances before the story was accepted for publication), and he proceeded to redraw and add to these as he felt best, without his publisher’s knowledge, during the Christmas holidays of December 1936 and January 1937, when he wasn’t teaching. Tolkien sent four of these black-and-white illustrations to his publisher, followed shortly by six more.

Tolkien was always very modest about his artistic skills and sent the drawings with the disclaimer that ‘they are not very good and may be technically unsuitable.’ Allen & Unwin were concerned that illustrations would increase the cost of production (and thus the sale price), but in the end concluded that ‘they were so charming that we could not but insert them, although economically it was quite wrong to do so.’ Most of the images had to be turned sideways so that they did not lose any intricate detail when the book was published. The first edition of The Hobbit included all ten illustrations, most of which appear in the 1976 calendar.

The front of the 1976 calendar is from the original dust jacket of the first edition of The Hobbit, which can be seen above, so this seems a good place to talk about this particular illustration, which must surely be considered one of the most recognisable fantasy book covers of all time. Allen & Unwin liked the maps and black-and-white illustrations that Tolkien had drawn for The Hobbit so much that they asked him to design the book’s dust jacket as well. Tolkien produced the now-iconic cover – a stylised landscape of forest, river, lake, and jagged, snow-capped mountains – during the Easter school holiday in 1937. The jacket was designed to wrap around the book with a single prominent mountain (the Lonely Mountain) positioned to appear on the spine. A dragon flies across the night sky on the back cover, while eagles soar in daylight on the front – aligning the forces of good with light and the forces of evil with darkness. In a letter to Allen & Unwin, Tolkien explained that ‘the presence of the sun and moon in the sky together refers to the magic attaching to the door’ in the Lonely Mountain. There is a strong symmetry in the layout of the forests and mountains on both sides – only the appearance of Lake-town, jutting out of the Long Lake on stilts on the front cover, disturbs this effect.

Tolkien wanted to incorporate some red into the design and initially gave the sun and the dragon a pink tinge, but the publisher was adamant that another colour would be too expensive to print, and the red was removed, leaving blue, black, and green, along with the white of the paper. The runes, which run around the outside of the image, forming a border, are a nod to Tolkien’s day job as the Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and his expertise in Old English. Tolkien described the runes as ‘magical in appearance’ but more prosaic in translation. They read (starting in the lower left and moving anti-clockwise): THE HOBBIT OR THERE AND BACK AGAIN BEING THE RECORD OF A YEARS JOURNEY MADE BY BILBO BAGGINS OF HOBBITON COMPILED FROM HIS MEMORIES BY J.R.R. TOLKIEN AND PUBLISHED BY GEORGE ALLEN AND UNWIN LTD.

This dust jacket design was rejected outright by Tolkien’s American publisher, Houghton Mifflin. They stated, ‘We shall have our own jacket specially designed to harmonise with the illustrations. Your jacket has rather a British look which always seems to disconcert and depress our book trade.’ In the end, the dust jacket of the first American edition simply featured the watercolour painting of The Hill that Tolkien had produced (right).

January – Beorn’s Hall

This is one of several drawings that J.R.R. Tolkien made of the house of the shape-shifter Beorn, and the only one to be published during his life. The final pen and ink drawing appeared in the first edition of The Hobbit, while the coloured version by H.E. Riddett first appeared in The Hobbit Calendar 1976.

All of Tolkien’s pictures of the interior of Beorn’s house (published or not) depict a rustic, lofty hall similar in design to ancient Norse or Germanic mead halls, constructed of timber and with a central fire-pit, inside which warriors would often gather to feast, drink, and sleep. Smoke from the fire pit rises through a hole in the roof. The hall is sparsely furnished, and next to the long table are the ‘round drum-shaped sections of log, smoothed and polished, and low enough even for Bilbo’, which were rolled in by Beorn’s ponies.

Beorn is an Old English word, which originally meant ‘bear’ and, in a heroic sense, ‘man’. It is also linguistically connected to the Old Norse word björn, which also means ‘bear’.

February – The Trolls

As they leave the safe farmlands and villages of the Shire, Bilbo, Gandalf, and the Dwarves enter a rougher landscape with bad weather and worse perils ahead of them. The black-and-white ink drawing, simply titled The Trolls, was made by Tolkien to accompany the text in Chapter 2: Roast Mutton. It’s a dark and beautifully sinister image. In the centre, a ‘very large fire of beech-logs’ is burning, with thick plumes of smoke drifting upwards in swirling, stylised lines. The three trolls are hiding in the shadows of the surrounding trees, just beyond the circle of firelight, waiting for the dwarves to come one by one into the clearing so that they can pounce on them. One dwarf is approaching from the bottom of the picture. The trees suggest the bars of a cage, which is appropriate, as the clearing is a trap for the dwarves.

The basic composition was inspired by an illustration by Jennie Harbour (right) for the Story of Hansel and Gretel, which was included in a book of fairy tales in the Tolkien household. Tolkien also took from Harbour’s picture the elaborate dot-patterned textures on the trees and around the campfire, resulting in a quite stylised image. Tolkien intensified the darkness of the forest, to make it look more menacing, by filling the paper with black ink; the picture is, in fact, created mainly by the gaps in the (mostly vertical) lines of ink – the only white paint on the original is on the obtrusive arm of the troll on the right, which was applied as a correction.

March – The Misty Mountains looking West from the Eyrie towards Goblin Gate

A single visit to Switzerland as a young man laid the foundations for almost every mountain scene Tolkien wrote, and every mountain picture he drew. He later said, ‘The hobbit’s [Bilbo’s] journey from Rivendell to the other side of the Misty Mountains […] is based on my adventures [in Switzerland] in 1911.’ A terrible thunderstorm experienced in Switzerland, for example, which caused Tolkien and his party to lose their way and forced them to sleep in a cattle shed, influenced the ‘thunder-battle’ in Chapter 4. Meanwhile, the Aletsch Glacier provided some more memorable moments: at one point, boulders, released by thawing snow, rolled across the narrow footpath Tolkien was following, and he ended up sliding down a scree slope. This incident became the model for Thorin and Company’s hurried exit from the goblin caves.

This particular illustration is a panoramic view of the western face of the Misty Mountains, with a giant eagle in flight. A tall, jagged, many-faceted mountain dominates the centre, with many other peaks visible in the distance, capped with snow. Although it is not visible in H.E. Riddett’s colourised version of the image, you can see in the original black ink drawing below the Goblin Gate, the ‘back door’ through which Bilbo escapes the goblin tunnels, as a tiny black semi-circle in the mountains to the right. In the first edition of the book, the ink drawing was not turned sideways like the other landscape illustrations, but was much reduced on the page, resulting in much of the finer detail being lost.

July – The Elvenking’s Gate

April, May and June in The Hobbit Calendar 1976 featured three of the watercolour paintings that had previously been featured in the 1973 and 74 calendars (The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the-Water, Rivendell, and Bilbo comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves), but July has a picture that we haven’t looked at yet: The Elvenking’s Gate. This is, in fact, one of at least eight drawings and paintings of the entrance to the Elvenking’s halls in northern Mirkwood. It seems that Tolkien was experimenting with the shape of the entrance, the type of gate, and the perspective of the drawing.

What was presumably his final attempt (or at least the one he selected for publication) is a view directly in front of the Elvenking’s doors. Tall, slender trees on either side direct the eye along a central avenue to the bridge, stairs, and gate. For added depth, Tolkien used a gentle S-curve to carry the eye beyond the entrance, up and to the top of a distant hill.

In a letter to his grandson, Michael George, Tolkien wrote: ‘Mirkwood is not an invention of mine, but a very ancient name, weighted with legendary associations…’ In fact, the name belonged to a real place of mythic stature – a forest that had haunted the European imagination 2,000 years ago. Tolkien had read about the real Mirkwood at school in Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, which used its classical name, the Hercynian Forest. Caesar had heard that it would take 60 days to cross the forest from the Rhine eastward.

To the Germanic peoples who lived north of the forest, it was Myrkviðr (Old Norse for ‘dark wood’), and it formed a barrier to southward expansion, as well as a contested borderland between the Germanic Goths and the Huns. The old name was Anglicised as Mirkwood by 19th-century writers, notably William Morris, whose romance novel The House of the Wolfings – a favourite of Tolkien’s – tells of a confederated Gothic tribe fighting the incursions of Rome into their homeland within the Germanic forest.

August – Lake Town

The original pen and ink drawing of Lake-town by J.R.R. Tolkien was made to accompany the text in Chapter 10: A Warm Welcome. The town, built entirely on stilts above the Long Lake, is meticulously drawn, with many shapes and textures. Two swan-headed boats, similar to Viking-style longboats, can be seen in the calm lake. At the centre-right, there is a water gate for craft to pass underneath the buildings.

It is generally accepted that Tolkien based the design of Lake-town on those of ancient European lake villages. In fact, in the decades up to the writing of The Hobbit, lake settlements had been at the forefront of archaeological inquiry. The remains of some of these villages have been found in Switzerland, where Tolkien went on a walking holiday in 1911 – but evidence of such settlements has also been found in Scotland and England, notably on the Holderness Peninsula in Yorkshire, where Tolkien was stationed for nearly a year during the First World War. Several 19th- and early 20th-century monographs on these lakeside villages exist, and it is likely that one or more of them inspired Tolkien during his writing.

October – The Front Gate

September features the watercolour of the eagle seen in previous calendars (Bilbo woke with the early sun in his eyes), but for October, we have a new illustration called The Front Gate. As they climb up the Lonely Mountain, Bilbo and the dwarves see a ‘dark cavernous opening in a great cliff-wall’ between the mountain’s arms. ‘Out of it the waters of the Running River sprang; and out of it too there came a steam and a dark smoke’. This drawing, which accompanies the text in Chapter 11: On the Doorstep, illustrates this steaming archway – a visual symbol of Smaug lurking within – and the beginning of the river as it rushes towards the valley of Dale. The ground is ‘bare and rocky’, with only a couple of dead, skeletal trees to suggest that life had once flourished here, before Smaug laid waste to the surrounding lands. Now, however, the barren scree slope and cracked earth create an inhospitable feel.

November – The Mountain-path

For the final new illustration in the 1976 calendar (December features the iconic Conversation with Smaug watercolour), we have The Mountain-path, depicting the treacherous high-altitude trail the Company takes across the Misty Mountains. This powerful drawing depicts a barren landscape of rock and stone, with no vegetation in sight. The strong black-and-white lines create a dazzling, abstract image, almost mimicking the effects of a lightning strike as it illuminates the dark mountain pass. Interestingly, this illustration was used for the jacket of the original American edition of The Silmarillion.

The title of this drawing, The Mountain-path, is interesting as it connects two separate nouns with a hyphen. In fact, Tolkien did this quite frequently, and although these hyphens may stand out somewhat to modern readers, Tolkien seemed to be a fan of such archaic grammar, which is more usually found in pre-20th-century texts.

Next time, in The Lord of the Rings Calendar 1977, we will see lots of illustrations and rough sketches that, until then, had never seen the light of day.