Lord of the Rings

The official J.R.R. Tolkien calendars from the 1970s not only contained illustrations that had previously been released (such as the watercolour paintings seen in The Hobbit), but also several that had hitherto remained unpublished. Last time, we looked at the 1973 calendar, published by Ballantine Books and released only in America. The following year, Allen & Unwin published the UK’s first official calendar, a role it would continue for several years. Though this calendar was for the year 1974, it was released in August 1973, just a few weeks before J.R.R. Tolkien’s death on 2 September.

I was able to track down my father’s (somewhat damp) copy of the 1974 calendar (which he thinks he purchased at the time of its release), but I was surprised to see that it contained mostly the same pictures as the 1973 calendar. Nonetheless, there are a few different images, previously unreleased, and I’ll go through them all.

January – Mount Everwhite

The first illustration in the 1974 calendar – of ‘Mount Everwhite’, according to the caption – is not one that Tolkien readers would have been familiar with when the calendar was released. That’s because it depicts a location from Tolkien’s then-unpublished legendarium (which would start to be presented to readers three years later as The Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien). This is also the oldest work produced by Tolkien seen thus far; it was painted over 45 years before this calendar was released, in 1928. This was a particularly productive year for Tolkien, and he created many other artworks during his summer holidays in Lyme Regis in July and August.

The full title of this watercolour is Halls of Manwë on the Mountains of the World above Faerie. More famously, perhaps, it is known as a painting of Taniquetil. Manwë Súlimo was the ‘highest and holiest’ of the Valar (the Gods), and his halls were situated on top of the highest mountain in the world – Taniquetil – in Valinor, the land of the Gods. The summit of Taniquetil (meaning ‘High White Peak’) was permanently snow-capped and rose into the upper atmosphere, with its head among the stars. It was a watchtower and also a defence against the corrupting evil of Melkor.

After the theft of the Silmarils by Melkor and the destruction of the Two Trees by his monstrous ally, the giant spider Ungoliant, the land of Valinor grew dark. The Two Trees bore one last golden fruit and one final silver flower. Varda, the Queen of the Valar, set them in the skies as the sun and moon to light both Aman and Middle-earth, so that the exiled Elves (and the Men, who were yet to come) should not live in darkness. Varda was known in Middle-earth (and referred to in The Lord of the Rings) as Elbereth, the maker of stars.

Beyond this act of giving light to the world, the Valar became ever more isolationist, throwing up numerous defences to protect their realm from Melkor (henceforth known as Morgoth, ‘the black enemy’) and, in the process, leaving him free to wield his power over the Elves and Men in Middle-earth. From his throne on the high peak of Taniquetil, Manwë could see far across the sea to the shores of Middle-earth, and, though he gathered news from the hawks and eagles, he did not intervene in the battles between Morgoth and the peoples of Middle-earth.

This illustration of Taniquetil shows the mountain reaching impossibly high, up above the sun and moon into the upper atmosphere, where it is crowned by stars. At the foot of the mountain is one of the towns of the seafaring Elves, the Teleri. Two of their ships can be seen in the foreground, with a carved prow like the upheld neck of a swan, but with the general shape, oars, and square sails of a traditional Viking ship. Since the sun and the moon are both shown, the scene depicted dates to a period after the darkening of Valinor and the death of the Two Trees.

April – The Forest of Lothlórien in Spring

February and March feature images from The Hobbit that we saw in the last calendar, but April shows a new picture – a delicate, dream-like drawing of Lothlórien, a secret woodland realm protected by the Elves and the power of Galadriel’s ring. In creating Lothlórien, Tolkien gave full expression to his love of trees. This ethereal realm is said to be the most beautiful place in Middle-earth, and described by Aragorn as ‘the heart of Elvendom on earth’.

The mallorn trees that grew in Lothlórien, which are a species of Tolkien’s own invention, were of immense stature and grace, described in The Fellowship of the Ring, Book II, Chapter 6, as thus: ‘There are no trees like the trees of Lothlórien. For in the autumn, their leaves fall not, but turn to gold. Not till the spring comes and the new green opens do they fall, and then the boughs are laden with yellow flowers; and the floor of the wood is golden, and golden is the roof, and its pillars are of silver, for the bark of the trees is smooth and grey.’ This illustration depicts the forest in spring rather than in winter when the Fellowship visits.

In later writings, Tolkien revealed that the mallorn trees were a gift to the Elven King Gil-galad during the Second Age from the King of Númenor, who had in turn received them from the Elves of Tol Eressëa. Tolkien drew these mallorn trees (probably in the early 1940s) not for publication but for pleasure. ‘I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been,’ he once said.

Lothlórien is spoken of by various characters as if it were a place of legend, known mainly from songs. It may not have been mythical, but a sense of timelessness nonetheless imbued Lothlórien, so that it seemed to exist on a different plane; and to Frodo, it was as if ‘he had stepped over a bridge of time into a corner of the Elder Days.’ The relation of Lothlórien to the outside world allowed Tolkien to experiment with ‘Faerie time’, as he called it. Yet it also gave him some trouble. Notes, diagrams and rough drafts show that he seriously considered placing Lórien in a different time called ‘Lórien time’, which could intersect with, yet remain distinct from, an interlocking ‘Mortal time’. The idea was that, no matter how long the Fellowship spent in Lothlórien, no time would pass in the outside world. But this was hampered by Tolkien’s own requirement of inner consistency and his careful chronology of days, nights, seasons, and lunar phases. After juggling vainly to stretch or shrink Lorien time without disturbing the rest of Middle-earth, he finally abandoned the effort and discarded the idea.

Almost.

Tolkien inserted a conversation into ‘The Great River’ chapter, in which Frodo, Sam, Aragorn and Legolas discuss the length of their stay in Lórien, and whether time slowed down, sped up, or stopped while they were there. That they disagree is as far as Tolkien allowed himself to go with ‘Faerie time’. Sam lost track of the phases of the moon and speculated that time doesn’t ‘count’ in Lórien; Frodo attributed the apparent slowdown to Galadriel’s Elven ring; Aragorn seemed unaware of any discrepancy; and the Elf Legolas explained that since Elves are immortal, time, while it does not pause, passes both faster and slower for them than for Men.

December – Fangorn Forest

The last of the three new images in The J.R.R. Tolkien Calendar 1974 is, in my opinion, the most interesting one. As you can see from the caption at the bottom of the illustration, it apparently depicts the shadowed depths of Fangorn Forest. The two figures in the painting (one climbing over some tree roots on the left; another lying prone at the base of a great tree in the centre) must therefore be Pippin and Merry, straying into Fangorn before their encounter with Treebeard. Except… these figures are clearly not hobbits; they are far too slender, and the figure in the bottom left at least is wearing shoes. So, what’s going on?

This same image reappears in the 1978 calendar (called The Silmarillion Calendar), slightly cropped, and is captioned ‘Beleg finds Gwindor in Taur-nu-Fuin.’ This is more accurate: the painting actually dates back to 1928, long before The Lord of the Rings was conceived, and was made to illustrate a passage in Tolkien’s legendarium. The two figures are, in fact, elves. The elf climbing over the tree roots is Beleg Cúthalion of Doriath, bearing his great sword Anglachel as he searches for Túrin, his brother-in-arms, who has been taken captive by the orcs. Lost and wandering in the dreaded Taur-nu-Fuin, ‘the Trackless Forest of Deadly Nightshade’, he is drawn to a small blue light and comes across the prone figure of Gwindor of Nargothrond, lying at the base of a tree. The exhausted Elf was a fugitive from the mines of Angband, where he had been made to labour ceaselessly under the lash of the Balrogs. The small blue lamp, seen next to him, was created by the Elves from crystals that provided an undying light source.

Taur-nu-Fuin found its way into The Hobbit, redrawn in ink as the dark, oppressive Mirkwood. Later still, it was repurposed and published in the 1974 calendar with Tolkien’s consent, under a new title: Fangorn Forest. Tolkien seems to have felt that this old ‘Silmarillion’ picture could also have been used to illustrate the hobbits in Fangorn Forest, conveniently ignoring the presence of Elves in it. So, this one image, in one form or another, with its pale, spectral trees and tangled, serpentine roots, has been used to illustrate all three of Tolkien’s major works.

That’s it for the main illustrations in The J.R.R. Tolkien Calendar 1974, but on the back cover of the calendar is a bit of a surprise – a Númenórean tile, surrounded by various small kaleidoscopic patterns, beautifully coloured, with names underneath. The patterns are heraldic devices, utilised by various characters in Tolkien’s legendarium. Most of these names would have been unfamiliar to Lord of the Rings fans in the early 1970s, since the majority are characters who appear only in The Silmarillion, which wouldn’t be published for a few more years. I won’t be going over this picture yet because it will reappear in a later calendar, with additional heraldic devices, so I will wait until then.

But that particular calendar is still a few years off. The following Tolkien calendar I’ll be looking at will be The Hobbit Calendar 1976.