Feature
Tolkien & the New Art
Visual Sources for The Lord of the Rings
In a letter drafted in 1971, J. R. R. Tolkien recounts this incident:
A few years ago I was visited in Oxford by a man whose name I have forgotten (though I believe he was well-known). He had been much struck by the curious way in which many old pictures seemed to him to have been designed to illustrate The Lord of the Rings long before its time. He brought one or two reproductions. I think he wanted at first simply to discover whether my imagination had fed on pictures, as it clearly had been by certain kinds of literature and languages. When it became obvious that, unless I was a liar, I had never seen the pictures before and was not well acquainted with pictorial Art, he fell silent.
Clearly, it was an awkward moment. The man had seemed so sure he had found the sources of Tolkien’s inspiration. He continued,
I became aware that he was looking fixedly at me. Suddenly he said: “Of course you don’t suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book yourself?”
Pure Gandalf! I was too well acquainted with G. to expose myself rashly, or to ask what he meant. I think I said: “No, I don’t suppose so any longer.” I have never since been able to suppose so.
The point he wanted to make, of course, concerns the mysterious nature of inspiration and the imagination: He realized that he was in fact an instrument to which his story had been in some way vouchsafed, and that the ultimate source of inspiration lies outside the self.
Still, I think that Tolkien sells his visual memory short. Upon examination, it seems clear that there were pictures lodged in Tolkien’s memory, often specifically identifiable ones, that his imaginative alchemy reworked into quite a new sort of gold. In this article I propose to look at a few of these, which were commonplace in the culture in which Tolkien was raised and which nurtured his creative imagination, always bearing in mind that stern caveat of Gandalf: “He that breaks a thing apart to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”
Art for Ordinary Life
Taking things apart, however, is the favorite indoor sport of art historians. No artist works in a vacuum, and to recognize an artist’s sources, the imagery that appeals to him and works upon his mind, often sheds a certain light on his own originality and artistic purposes. We know from his letters that certain incidents in Tolkien’s life inspired episodes in The Lord of the Rings: a mountain hike in his youth that turned suddenly into a perilous descent becomes the failed assault upon Caradhras; his experiences at the Somme at least underlie his description of the Dead Marshes; and the whole of the trilogy can be read as his response to the Great War.
His experience of art, too, runs as an undercurrent or theme throughout the trilogy. For instance, the very notion of the Ring itself shows us Tolkien’s deep and abiding interest in craftsmanship, particularly of metalwork. The entire race of Dwarves devotes its collective life to the craftsman’s art, and the Elves, who represent the creative angelic powers in Tolkien’s subcreation, manifest their creative powers in their working of gems and metals.
Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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