Lord of the Rings

One of the great things about Nostalgic Worlds is that its scope is very large. I can switch subjects whenever I want, and there’s little danger of my being burned out by any particular topic. This is just as well because my hyper-fixations change often and suddenly. Yesterday, for example, I was supposed to be writing the next Mario Kart article, but I stumbled across my dad’s battered old J.R.R. Tolkien calendars from the 1970s and 80s. He collected quite a few of them (some at the time of release; others many years later, at considerable expense), and although I’ve seen them before, for some reason I became more interested in them this time round. I have recently started re-reading The Hobbit, and my copy includes several of Tolkien’s original illustrations. Something about these old watercolour paintings struck a chord with me. I wanted to find out more about them.

Luckily, many of my dad’s old Tolkien calendars feature illustrations by Tolkien himself, and these are the ones I’m going to look at. I’ll start at the beginning, with what I believe was the very first official Tolkien calendar, simply called The J.R.R. Tolkien Calendar 1973. In the future, I will scan some of the images if necessary, but my dad’s copy of the 1973 calendar (which I think is at least third-hand and shipped over from America) is in pretty poor shape, so I’ll be sourcing its images from the internet. If you have even the slightest interest in Tolkien’s (often overlooked) art, I encourage you to seek out one of several books on the subject that have been published over the years, such as J.R.R. Tolkien Artist and Illustrator or Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien (the latter of which I own). These books – and others – will provide more substantial, in-depth information on the illustrations than I could ever provide, and they also show the pictures in better quality.

The J.R.R. Tolkien Calendar 1973 was published in America by Ballantine Books. It contained five watercolour paintings that Tolkien produced for The Hobbit, along with some hitherto unpublished pictures that he made while writing The Lord of the Rings. We’ll get to those shortly, but first, we start off the calendar with an illustration that wasn’t made by Tolkien at all!

January – There and Back Again: A Map of Bilbo’s Journey through Eriador and Rhovanion

There and Back Again: A Map of Bilbo’s Journey through Eriador and Rhovanion, initially released as a poster in 1971, was created by Pauline Baynes, Tolkien’s illustrator of choice for his works while he was still alive. It reproduces Tolkien’s own Map of Wilderland as seen in The Hobbit, but it also extends into Eriador, the land west of the Misty Mountains. As such, it includes all the regions through which Thorin and Company passed during the quest from Hobbiton to the Lonely Mountain, including the Shire, Rivendell, and Mirkwood. Baynes also incorporated iconic scenes and locations from the book into small circular illustrations, or vignettes, scattered across the map.

In all, There and Back Again is a beautiful map, more decorative than cartographically accurate, and the use of rich colours and whimsical details really captures the fantasy and adventurous charm of Tolkien’s world.

Pauline Baynes’ earlier poster, Map of Middle-earth, from 1970 (which we’ll see shortly), was produced in collaboration with Tolkien himself. In fact, he personally sent Baynes a marked photocopy of the general Middle-earth map, along with some additional names to include and advice on a few points of topography and nomenclature. For the 1971 map of Bilbo’s journey, reproduced here in the 1973 calendar, it seems, according to all sources, that Tolkien did not give Baynes any additions or instructions; he merely asked to approve the art before it went to press.

Before we delve into the illustrations for the next five months, a bit of background information on The Hobbit is probably needed. The first edition of the book, published in Great Britain on 21 September 1937 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd, included ten black-and-white illustrations; they are not included here, but they appeared (colourised by H.E. Riddett) in a later calendar, which we shall get to in time. That first impression was limited to only 1,500 copies. The book proved so popular that the first print sold out very quickly, and a second printing was required before Christmas. A few months previously, an American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Company, based in Boston, Massachusetts, also expressed interest in publishing The Hobbit. Although they wanted to include Tolkien’s line drawings in their edition, they also felt that some colour illustrations were needed for the American market. They suggested employing ‘good American artists’ to supply four paintings. Allen & Unwin, on Tolkien’s behalf (for they had started to serve as the middleman between the author and his soon-to-be American publisher), affirmed this to be a good idea. Still, they thought it would be even better ‘if all the illustrations were from [the author’s] hand.’

Allen & Unwin suggested to Tolkien that he should produce these paintings himself. Tolkien was ‘divided between knowledge of my own inability and fear of what American artists (doubtless of admiral skill) might produce’; he was also concerned that ‘four professional pictures would make my own amateurish productions look rather silly’. So, Tolkien undertook the commission himself and produced not four but five watercolour illustrations – one of which, The Hill, was heavily based on one of his previous drawings. Remarkably, these were all made within one or two weeks in mid-July 1937, except The Hill, which was completed by mid-August. The scenes were selected, according to Tolkien, ‘so as to distribute illustrations fairly evenly throughout the book (especially when taken in conjunction with the black-and-white drawings)’.

His English publisher was quick to see the merit of these watercolour paintings, and although they were produced too late to be included in the first UK printing of The Hobbit, four of them were added to the second printing, released in January 1938. Tolkien received $100 from Houghton Mifflin for the five watercolours, which was a large sum of money at the time.

February – The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the-Water

This, to my mind at least, is the most iconic painting that Tolkien created to accompany his work. It depicts the road winding through Hobbiton as it goes across The Water and up The Hill to where Bilbo Baggins lives at Bag End. In the foreground, on the banks of The Water, the Old Mill can be seen. Further along the path stands the Old Grange, and as you start to go up The Hill proper, the three hobbit holes of Bagshot Row can be seen on the left, built into the grassy side of The Hill itself. Just below Bag End is the field with the Party Tree, where Bilbo will later celebrate his ‘eleventy-first’ birthday. It seems to be an idyllic rural countryside – one that Bilbo is reluctant to leave, and one to which he longs to return many times while he is adventuring in the wild lands far to the east.

Tolkien made several preliminary sketches of this same view – at least six, in varying stages of completeness, as he tried to achieve the right balance of proportions and the gentler course of the lane he had been aiming for. The final pencil and ink drawing (right) is one of Tolkien’s most meticulously drawn pictures. It was used as a frontispiece for the first British edition of The Hobbit in 1937 and immediately introduced readers to the peaceful rural land where hobbits lived. By the time of the second printing, the watercolour version had been substituted as the frontispiece, and the original line drawing was not seen again (to my knowledge) for a very long time.

In Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien, a 1979 book that collected together many of Tolkien’s published artworks, the watercolour version of The Hill was, of course, featured – and so, too, was the black-and-white drawing that preceded it. Or so the book claimed. Somehow or other, though, an unpublished sketch of Hobbiton (below), similar but nonetheless different from the one that appeared in The Hobbit’s first frontispiece, was accidentally included instead. This was, in fact, a tracing Tolkien had made of the original ink frontispiece to transfer its outlines to a fresh sheet, on which he painted the watercolour. The real ink frontispiece wouldn’t make a reappearance until the second edition of Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien in 1992, by which time the error had been fixed.

The watercolour painting of The Hill is a very close copy of the line drawing, but there are a few minor differences. In the original drawing, the windows of the Old Mill, for example, are rectangular, but in the painting, they have become circular in design, like those at Bag End, which is more consistent with hobbit architecture. Some of the writing on the little signpost in the bottom left corner is also different. In both illustrations, the sign pointing to the left-hand side of the page says ‘West’, but the sign pointing north, up the road, has been changed from ‘Bag End’ in the line drawing to the ‘Hill’ in the painting. Finally, some of the generic deciduous trees have become, more specifically, the chestnuts that Saruman would later cut down in The Lord of the Rings.

The Shire is an idealised view of the English countryside that Tolkien loved from childhood. Though he was born in South Africa in 1892, he came to England when he was a young boy, and he spent four years in the Warwickshire village of Sarehole. Tolkien recalled that these years were ‘the longest-seeming and most formative part of my life.’ The lush, green landscape of the English Midlands clearly made a strong impression on him, and he fell in love with the trees, the rivers, and the country folk. Though only five miles from the centre of Birmingham, Sarehole itself stood in a countryside still little altered by the modern age. It was a world that had more in common with ‘the lands and hills of the most primitive and wildest stories,’ Tolkien recalled.

When Tolkien came to write The Hobbit and make the accompanying illustrations, he based the Shire partly on ‘a few cherished square miles of actual countryside at Sarehole’, and partly on English village life in general, with, in Tolkien’s words, ‘gardens, trees, and unmechanised farmland’. The large watermill in the foreground was apparently inspired by the mill in Sarehole and was a crucial element in Tolkien’s conception of a pre-industrial rural land.

To J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit had always been an illustrated book. The text does not depend upon pictures, but it often benefits from them. For example, Chapters 1 and 2 give the reader only a general idea of Hobbiton and the larger hobbit country. We know that it is a green land, with trees and flowers. We also know that there is a garden in front of Bag-End, and meadows which slope down to a stream. A lane leads from Bilbo’s door, past a ‘great Mill, across The Water, and so for a whole mile or more’ to the village of Bywater. And that’s about it. As written in The Hobbit, it is almost a generic landscape, with generic names (‘The Hill’, ‘The Water’). It was only when The Lord of the Rings was published (18 years after The Hobbit, mind you) that readers learnt that hobbits lived in a place called The Shire. But Tolkien’s picture of Hobbiton as seen in his first book is worth a thousand words; it immediately introduced readers to the tranquil ‘hobbit-lands’, with its well-tended landscape of fields, hedgerows, and trees. A sandy lane bridges the river and winds between gardens with colourful flowerbeds, up to a cutting on the hillside where Bag End can be seen. The placement of Bag End itself, close to the very top of the Hill, slightly set apart from the other hobbit-holes, reveals Bilbo’s comfortable position in Hobbiton society. This one image really brings the hobbit village to life. What is more, it directly influenced the description of Hobbiton in The Lord of the Rings, where Bagshot Row, the Old Grange, and the Party Tree are first mentioned in the text. It’s also clear that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy borrowed heavily from this painting in designing the movie version of Hobbiton.

Finally, before we move on, I find it interesting that Tolkien capitalises the few names he devised for the ‘hobbit-lands’ of The Hobbit, such as The Hill. It seems to reinforce the parochial nature of hobbits in general. They are only concerned with their own small patch of the world, as if it would be inconceivable to them that other waterways and other hills might exist elsewhere. Theirs are the only ones that matter – that is why they are The Hill and The Water. It’s also why the hobbits’ town is Hobbiton, and its neighbour is Bywater – simply because it’s by The Water.

March – Rivendell

The famous Rivendell, home to Elrond, is a magical elven sanctuary, hidden deep within a secluded valley. It is also called The Last Homely House East of the Sea, alluding to the wilderness that lies east of the Misty Mountains. Tolkien made several drawings of Rivendell and at least two preparatory sketches of Elrond’s house before arriving at this composition. It illustrates perfectly the hidden location of the Last Homely House, nestled in the deep cleft (the riven dell) carved out by the river. Through the ravine, the Misty Mountains can be seen in the distance.

The decorative title piece at the bottom of the painting includes a water motif, echoing and emphasising the rushing river and waterfall. But in the American edition of The Hobbit, the image was truncated, and the title ‘Rivendell’ within the decorative border was removed, causing Tolkien to comment: ‘I cannot imagine why they have spoilt the Rivendell picture by slicing the top and cutting out the ornament at the bottom’.

The tall peaks of the Rivendell watercolour were almost certainly based on the Swiss Alps. Tolkien had personally walked among great mountains and valleys during a 1911 tour of Switzerland with his brother and aunt, and he acknowledged that the experience influenced the writing of The Hobbit. His adventure through the Alps was similar to the type of travel that Tolkien describes in his books. Breakfasts were meagre, and other meals were cooked in the open air on spirit stoves; they navigated by map and avoided roads wherever possible; and the men often slept in cowsheds.

According to the scholar Marie Barnfield, Tolkien’s painting of Rivendell is very likely based on the Lauterbrunnen Valley; it is notably deep and narrow, with steep limestone precipices, and is cut through by a river called the White Lütschine.

April – Bilbo woke with the early sun in his eyes

This painting is the only watercolour created for The Hobbit not to have an accompanying title, but Tolkien indicated that the picture should appear opposite the opening line of Chapter 7 (Queer Lodgings): ‘The next morning, Bilbo woke up with the early sun in his eyes.’ The painting depicts the morning after Bilbo and the Dwarves were rescued from the goblins and wargs by the Great Eagles. Jagged snow-covered peaks stretch to the horizon. Golden sunlight shines upon the land, while ‘mists were in the valleys and hollows and twined here and there about the peaks and pinnacles of the hills’. The giant, majestic eagle was inspired by the painting of an immature golden eagle by Archibald Thorburn (below), which his youngest son Christopher found for him in The Birds of the British Isles and their Eggs (published in 1919 by T.A. Coward), one of the natural history books kept in the Tolkien family library (Tolkien omitted the eagle’s dead prey for his own painting).

Strangely, this painting shows Bilbo wearing black boots, which hobbits typically do not wear. There is also no mention in the text of Bilbo having acquired them. According to Tolkien, this acquisition ‘dropped out somewhere or other in the various revisions – the bootings occurred at Rivendell, and [Bilbo] was again bootless after leaving Rivendell on the way home.’

When Tolkien’s British publisher, Allen & Unwin, decided to include Tolkien’s new watercolour paintings for their second impression of The Hobbit, this was the only one of the five that was omitted. It did, however, appear in the first American edition of the book, in 1938.

May – Bilbo comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves

This illustration shows Bilbo escaping from the darkness of Mirkwood, floating down the forest river towards the village of the Raft-elves, with the barrels containing the 13 dwarves – there are six in the stream (including the one Bilbo is riding), plus several more that have already reached the shore; the barel to the right is only partly in frame, suggesting that there are still more to come.

In the text, Bilbo arrives at the huts of the Raft-elves in the dark during the middle of the night, rather than in the early morning sun, as shown in this illustration (although it should be noted that an earlier version of the painting does indeed show Bilbo arriving by moonlight; see the Tolkien Calendar 1979). In addition, although Bilbo is wearing the Ring at this point in the story, there is no suggestion in the painting that he is invisible. According to The Art of The Hobbit, these are likely due to ‘matters of artistic licence.’

Bilbo comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves is a beautifully composed piece (even to my untrained eye), with the sinuous river leading out from under the dark eaves of the forest, framed by the dark trees overhead. It is less naturalistic than the Eagle picture, and the stylised trees match the decorative Art Nouveau border at the bottom, with its tree-and-river motif. Tolkien once stated in his lecture ‘On Fairy-Stories’, delivered at the University of St. Andrews, ‘An enchanted forest requires a margin, even an elaborate border. To print it conterminous with the page […] as if it were indeed a ‘snap’ of fairyland or a ‘sketch by our artist on the spot’, is a folly and an abuse.’

Although Tolkien produced five watercolour paintings for The Hobbit, both his British publisher, Allen & Unwin, and his American publisher, Houghton Mifflin, included only four of them in their respective publications. As already stated, Allen & Unwin omitted ‘Bilbo woke with the early sun in his eyes‘; but Houghton Mifflin left out ‘Bilbo comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves‘. This decision particularly disappointed Tolkien, as it was his favourite one, which he felt had captured the scene most successfully. It wasn’t until the early 1970s that an edition of The Hobbit finally appeared that included all five paintings as the author had originally intended.

June – Conversation with Smaug

If the image of Hobbiton is perhaps Tolkien’s most iconic illustration, then this must surely be a close second in my view. When Thorin and Company reach the Lonely Mountain and gain entry via a secret door, Bilbo ventures inside. After seeing the dragon Smaug, the hobbit doesn’t stay for very long – but on his second visit inside the mountain, he is detected by Smaug and has a conversation with the great dragon. This vivid, richly coloured painting depicts the beginning of this scene, as Bilbo bows politely. The billowing cloud of vapour around the silhouette of Bilbo is meant to indicate that he cannot be seen while wearing the magic ring. Smaug himself can be seen sprawling on a bed of treasure, with his tail curled possessively around his hoard, as wisps of smoke rise from his nostrils. Tolkien later expressed displeasure with the depiction of Bilbo in this image, commenting that the figure, ‘apart from being fat in the wrong place’, is also ‘enormously too large’ relative to the dragon.

There are several other little details to see in this painting. Shining like a star at the top of the vast hoard is almost certainly the Arkenstone, which to Thorin Oakenshield was the most precious treasure of all. To the left of the end of the dragon’s tail may be ‘the necklace of Girion, Lord of Dale, made of five hundred emeralds green as grass’, as described in the book. Of the dwarves that once lived in this great hall, only bones and discarded weapons remain. Above, bats circle like vultures.

A large terracotta jar filled with gold stands in the bottom left corner. It is so big that the old dwarven residents of the Lonely Mountain clearly needed to use a ladder to reach the treasure inside. The jar’s outer surface is inscribed with a mysterious script. This was, in fact, the first public appearance of Tolkien’s invented Elvish script, tengwar. Tolkien had been creating Elvish languages and legends for over 20 years by the late 1930s, but none had been published before The Hobbit. In the Middle-earth legendarium, tengwar was a script invented by the Elven prince, Fëanor, and so they became known as Fëanorian letters. They were devised in Valinor, the land of the Gods, and brought to Middle-earth by the Elves during their years of exile. Fëanor was one of the most gifted of Elves and created the Silmarils, the three great jewels that contained the light of the Two Trees of Valinor.

The extent of Tolkien’s linguistic inventions was only revealed 18 years later, with the publication of The Lord of the Rings. Appendices included at the back of The Return of the King finally provided the necessary tools to translate the script on the jar: it is basically a warning in tengwar, and although it is partially obscured, it seems to read, ‘gold [of] Thror [and] Thrain accursed be the thief.’

Centrefold – A Map of Middle-earth

The centrefold of The J.R.R. Tolkien Calendar 1973 features a beautiful map of northwestern Middle-earth. This is a reproduction of the 1970 poster map made by Pauline Baynes that I mentioned earlier, after extensive consultation with Tolkien himself. Tolkien supplied some additional place names that weren’t included on his own (or his son Christopher’s) Middle-earth maps, such as Dorwinion, Eryn Vorn, and Andrast, along with the towns Framsburg, Edhellond, and Lond Daer. Other additions included wooded areas in Enedhwaith and around the river Isen, which were not indicated as such on earlier maps. Interestingly, the Sea of Rhûn in this map is entirely occupied by water. In contrast, the earlier (as well as the later) map by Christopher Tolkien indicated that it contained an island.

Baynes added vignettes of many of the key places from the books, which prompted Tolkien to comment that ‘some of these pictures agree remarkably with my own vision: especially the first four on the right (Minas Morgul is almost exact).’

July – Death of Smaug

This rough sketch shows the black arrow shot by Bard the Bowman finding its mark in Smaug’s belly above the burning Lake-town. Perhaps it was an aid to the writing of Chapter 14: Fire and Water, in which Smaug is killed; or maybe it was a preliminary sketch for one of the watercolour paintings Tolkien agreed to produce, but in this instance abandoned. At any rate, he did not consider it suitable for publication.

Death of Smaug resurfaced many years later. Tolkien sent it to Allen & Unwin in 1965 as a help or inspiration to a cover artist for the 1966 Unwin paperback edition of The Hobbit. He noted some errors in its margin, which he hoped the new cover artist, whoever that might be, would take into consideration. On the left-hand side of the picture, it reads: ‘The moon should be a crescent: it was only a few nights after the New Moon on Durin’s Day’ (thus a crescent shape is faintly sketched within the moon’s circle); in the bottom left-hand corner: ‘Dragon should have a white naked spot where the arrow enters’; and at the bottom: ‘Bard the Bowman should be standing after release of arrow at extreme left point of the piles.’

As it turns out, Allen & Unwin did not hire a new cover artist – they simply used Tolkien’s sketch as the cover for their new edition. Tolkien was apparently not very happy about ‘the use of this scrawl as a cover’.

August – Old Man Willow

Here we come to the first illustration that (as far as I’m aware) had never been published before the release of the 1973 calendar. Dating to around 1938, this is a drawing that illustrates the descriptions of the gnarled willow tree encountered by the hobbits in the Old Forest in The Fellowship of the Ring: ‘Enormous it looked, its sprawling branches going up like reaching arms with many long-fingered hands, its knotted and twisted trunk gaping in wide fissures that creaked faintly as the boughs moved.’

Tolkien made several illustrations while writing The Lord of the Rings, often in coloured pencil, using a muted palette. It is unlikely that any were drawn with publication in mind, and indeed, his publisher never suggested an illustrated version of The Lord of the Rings. Drawing, however, remained part of Tolkien’s creative process and was probably a form of relaxation as well as an aid to personally visualising the imaginary scenes and landscapes of Middle-earth. Most of these illustrations were incomplete sketches, but occasionally, in the course of writing, he produced finished drawings such as Old Man Willow.

Once, a vast primordial forest covered much of Eriador before the Second Age, which reached from the Shire all the way to Fangorn, hundreds of miles to the southeast. What became known as the Old Forest was the northern edge of that immense forest, and one of the few patches that survived the deforestation by the Númenóreans and the wars against Sauron. The Old Forest is famously home to the mysterious Tom Bombadil and a malign tree-spirit of great age known as Old Man Willow.

Tolkien had a deep love of the natural world and especially of trees. In a note supplied to his American publisher, he states, ‘I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals.’ Trees and tree-like creatures feature prominently throughout The Lord of the Rings. But in Tolkien’s work, trees are not passive, immobile victims; they have the power to menace and overwhelm intruders, or even to pursue them. Many were a force for good, such as Treebeard, the guardian of the ancient forest of Fangorn, but a few had black hearts like Old Man Willow. In this drawing, Tolkien captures both the deceptively pleasant ‘golden afternoon of late sunshine’ and the more nightmarish aspects of the Old Forest, where trees such as those drawn in the background grow thick and close.

Tolkien is reported to have said that the idea of someone being caught in a closing crack of a great willow probably came to him in part from Arthur Rackham’s drawings of gnarled trees, while his son John thought that Old Man Willow was inspired by a particular unpollarded willow tree on the banks of the River Cherwell near their home in Oxford. The character of Willow-man predated The Lord of the Rings, appearing first in Tolkien’s Oxford Magazine poem of 1934, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.

September/October – Moria Gate

Next, we come to these two intriguing images, both published for the first time in the 1973 calendar. The one at the bottom is the picture that accompanies September; the one above it, October. But I’m putting them in reverse order because, as can clearly be seen, they are part of the same image. This coloured pencil drawing (c. 1939) is of the West Gate of Moria, on the western side of the Misty Mountains, by which the Fellowship of the Ring entered the mines. The drawing is dominated by the imposing stone wall behind the doorway, both hostile and impregnable. To the right of centre, a single tentacle rises from the lake, hinting at the monster lurking beneath the water.

In the first edition of Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien, published in 1979, both the larger illustration (which I shall call Moria Gate I, or MG I for simplicity) and the smaller, strip-like drawing (which I shall call Moria Gate II, or MG II) were included. However, Christopher Tolkien erroneously described MG II as ‘the steps leading up to the Great Gates of Moria on the eastern side of the Misty Mountains’. He later realised that MG II could not be made to fit the description of the East Gate of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring, and since the bottom of MG I closely matches the top of MG II, he discovered that the latter was the original lower part of one large image, which J.R.R. Tolkien himself had cut off at some point after the drawing was finished. Christopher Tolkien subsequently found a letter from his father to Rayner Unwin, referring to the 1973 calendar, in which he said: ‘The picture for September [MG II] seems to me rather poor: the bottom end of the following picture for October [MG 1], which was cut off and not meant to be used.’

Tolkien probably drew this view of the Moria Gate before he had written the scene in which the Fellowship approach the entrance to the Mines: ‘Rounding the corner, they saw before them a low cliff, some five fathoms high, with a broken and jagged top. Over it a trickling water dripped…’ It seems likely that Tolkien removed (but fortunately did not discard) the bottom section of the picture, which contains the title, because he was hoping to eliminate, as much as possible, the elements that did not match his written description. Clearly wishing to salvage the drawing in some way, he kept the more accurate upper part – but even so, there are still discrepancies between the image and the final text. As Christopher Tolkien notes in his accompanying text for MG II in the second, updated edition of Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Even with the bottom strip removed the Stair Falls appear as a foaming torrent…’ And then there’s the dwarf door on the other side of the lake. In the book, the arched top, steps, and columns of the gate became part of the design cut into the doors of the gate, rather than external elements. Also, it can be argued that the gate should not even be visible at all, since ‘Dwarf-gates are not made to be seen’. But Moria Gate remains a very interesting image because it is almost certainly the earliest representation of this scene, preceding any written account.

November – Barad-dûr

The last illustration of the 1973 calendar (December features a photo of J.R.R. Tolkien himself) shows Sauron’s vertiginous fortress in Mordor, Barad-dûr (Sindarin for ‘Dark Tower’). It was built by Sauron in the Second Age and was strengthened by the power of the One Ring, which had recently been forged; its foundations would survive for as long as the Ring existed. In this illustration, the intimidating stronghold is shown on top of a rocky outcrop and is described in the text as ‘reared upon a long spur of the Ashen Mountains thrust down from the North.’ Only a corner of the tower is seen, leaving the viewer’s imagination to build a much larger complex.

The reader first sees Barad-dûr through Frodo’s eyes as he sits on top of Amon Hen, where it is described as thus: ‘Wall upon wall, battlement upon battlement, black, immeasurably strong, mountain of iron, gate of steel, tower of adamant, he saw it: Barad-dûr, Fortress of Sauron. All hope left him.’ This doesn’t seem to fit Tolkien’s illustration seen here; the walls seem to be mainly grey stone and brick rather than black iron and steel, and there are no battlements and gates. Nonetheless, it still conveys a grim, brooding presence, with Mount Doom erupting in the distance.

And that’s it for the 1973 calendar. Next time, I’ll be looking at the J.R.R. Tolkien Calendar 1974. See you then!