Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth ed. by Catherine McIlwaine

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth ed. by Catherine McIlwaine Hugh Crago (bio) Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth. Edited by Catherine McIlwaine. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2018. Catherine McIlwaine's large, lavishly illustrated catalog of her recent exhibition of the Bodleian Library's J. R. R. Tolkien holdings is well organized, well written (with a minimum of repetition from annotation to annotation), and introduced by six short essays by experts on different aspects of the author's life and work. It opens a window onto Tolkien's imagination and the way it worked, with particular emphasis on the visual element. For any Tolkien scholar, McIlwaine's book will become indispensable. My very first encounter with The Hobbit was a visual one. I was about ten years old and was convalescing after the removal of my appendix. My father, a newly appointed Inspector of Schools, borrowed for me a brand-new copy of the book. I can remember sitting up in bed, gazing at its cover design. The stylized composition (forest, water, and mountains, layered one behind another), and the strong colors (leaf green, Prussian blue, black, and white) made an immediate impression. Before I actually read the book, that cover had shaped my expectations. The word that best describes those expectations is "north-ernness"—the word used by Tolkien's friend C. S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy, and the subject of one of the catalog's introductory essays (by Tom Shippey). Tolkien's cover design (I had no idea then that the author himself was responsible for it) spoke to me of high adventure and struggle in a world simpler and grander than the real one that I was starting to know. Because I was an Australian child in the 1950s, the cover that I saw was the one that Tolkien designed for the first (1937) British edition of The Hobbit. American child readers saw a more bucolic cover, "The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the-Water," which appealed more to the "cozy" side of the story than to the "high fantasy" side; Tolkien, wary of what US illustrators might do with his story, offered his American publishers a new set of illustrations of his own, some of which were incorporated into later British editions. Significantly, the cover design that I saw at ten contained no living creatures, with the single exception (on the back) of a tiny Smaug, high up in the sky and heading purposefully over the mountains from right to left. One of the many revelations offered by McIlwaine is that such things mattered intensely to Tolkien; witness his successive designs for the cover of The Two Towers many years later, which appear on pages 369–71 of the catalog. What emerges unmistakably [End Page 229] is the author's need to give visual form to many of his subcreations. He was not a professional artist, and he had his limitations (the most notable, perhaps, being his self-confessed inability to draw the human figure—or even the Halfling figure!), but he was a compulsive "doodler" (intricate designs in colored ballpoints drawn on newspaper crossword puzzles, for instance), and the many unpublished illustrations reproduced in this volume show how insistently he tried to picture the scenes that he had already created in words. Just as the languages of Middle-Earth came first for Tolkien and the stories only later, so the vision of his imagined world seemed as important to him as the words in which he described it—so reminiscent of the early compositions of Charlotte Brontë and other child "world-makers" described by Michele Root-Bernstein. The best of his illustrations (such as "Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft Elves," which forms the cover of McIlwaine's catalog) are creditable examples of the Art Nouveau style fashionable in Tolkien's youth. Others are reminiscent of Ivan Bilibin in Tolkien's love of borders, complete with meaningful runic inscriptions. In his preference for formal design over the human figure, Tolkien resembled William Morris, who famously exclaimed to his model Janey, "I cannot paint you, but I love you," a conflict that he attempted to resolve by marrying her. Indeed, there is more than a little...