The Third Age: the Lord of the Rings [Alan Lee]

– Alan Lee –

More to come…

My chief concern in illustrating The Lord of the Rings was in attempting to provide a visual accompaniment for the story without interfering with, or dislodge the pictures the author is carefully building up in the readers mind. I felt that my task lay in shadowing the heroes on their epic quest, often at a distance, closing in on them at times of heightened emotion but avoiding trying to re-create the dramatic high points of the text. One of the strongest images, for me, is that of Gollum dancing on the edge of the Crack of Doom with Frodo’s severed finger in his hand, but it was the very vividness of that scene which deterred me from with wishing to depict it. (I preferred to try to capture the looming presence of Mount Doom itself, a few pages earlier, with Gollum watching the travellers from behind a rock; believing that if, as hoped, the reader’s impression of the volcano was strengthened then the subsequent events inside could be even more powerful.) Such considerations were made simpler by technical ones. Printed separately on a coated art paper, the pictures had to be positioned at intervals of sixteen or thirty-two pages throughout the book. This limitation was received gratefully and probably saved weeks of fruitless agonizing over which moments to illustrate. It was important that every picture should be relevant to the text on the opposite page. It also suited my inclination towards finding subjects in some of the less obvious places. It is such a rich work though that there are few, if any, pages in which something dramatic, wonderful or terrifying is not happening somewhere – and passages so beautiful and elegaic that any attempts to make them visible seem clumsy by comparison. Tolkien succeeded in creating a world which exists beyond the scope of his own narrative. By establishing such a powerfully imagined landscape, and firm foundations of history and myth, he has made Middle-earth available to all of us for our own imaginative wanderings. I feel immensely privileged to have been allowed to illustrate The Lord of the Rings, a book which has a profound impact on first reading and which has probably influenced the direction of my career over the following twenty-five years. It steered me, not towards fantasy, but to an invigorated interest in myth and legend, and a lifelong appreciation of the wonderful skills of the storyteller.

Alan Lee,

“Tolkien’s World”