Station Zero

 The year has got off to a slow start here because I’ve been poorly, so I’ve started illustrating The Lord of the Rings (as you do). The idea is to do drawings of the bits that don’t usually get illustrated (or that I haven’t seen many pictures of, at least). My favourite parts of the book are the early chapters about the Shire, Bree, and Eriador , so I may just concentrate on those, though maybe I’ll venture further for a bit of variety. I doubt I could manage the big cities and battles in the later parts, but who knows, maybe my penmanship will improve with practise.  Here are the elf towers on the Tower Hills: The Last Bridge over the River Hoarwell… The road from Hobbiton to Buckland… And a random hobbit lady feeding her chickens. More to come, though productivity will probably drop off because I have Actual Work on now, and a new small film to plan. Announcements about both next week.

One of the stories in this collection is Leaf by Niggle, an allegorical tale about an artist in which Tolkien is plainly expressing his anxiety that his work of creating Middle Earth will never be finished and that what fragments he does manage to produce will be ignored by most people and eventually forgotten altogether. It’s quite affecting, and I suppose he never did finish it, but there seems little danger of it being forgotten, since all his notes and half-finished stories are now available as pricey books. This one, Tales from the Perilous Realm , comes with a beautiful Alan Lee painting of a hero confronting a dragon on the front, perhaps designed to nudge the unwary purchaser into thinking they’re buying something Lord of the Rings related. What they’ll actually be taking home is an anthology of short tales which were mostly available as separate small volumes when I was a young ‘un, bulked out with Tolkien’s essay On Fairy Tales . Farmer Giles of Ham is the central story, ...

When I started re-reading The Lord of the Rings recently I thought I might get a blog post out of it, or maybe even two. Now, nine posts later, we finally draw near to the Grey Havens. If you have been, thanks for reading... Alan Lee So Sauron has been defeated, the War of the Ring is ended, the might of Mordor is destroyed, and Aragorn has taken his rightful place as king of Gondor with Arwen as his queen. Yay! And yet the the tone of The Return of the King becomes tinged with melancholy almost as soon as the Ring is destroyed. For its destruction doesn't just mean the end of the Dark Lord: it also heralds the end of the age of the Elves and the Ents, the age of magic. John Boorman, moving on from his abortive 1970s Lord of the Rings adaptation to direct the Arthurian epic Excalibur , gave Merlin a line which Gandalf or Galadriel might have said (and perhaps would have, if his version of Middle-earth had reached the screen). ' Our days are numbered. The old ways ...

I am re-reading The Lord of the Rings and blogging about some of the vague half-formed thoughts that it sends flittering, moth-like, across my sensorium... It's not hard to see why illustrators and film makers have been drawn to The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's writing, especially about landscape, is incredibly visual. Here's Sam, alone on the pass of Cirith Ungol after Frodo's capture by the orcs, getting his first proper look down into Mordor. Hard and cruel and bitter was the land that met his gaze. Before his feet the highest ridge of the Ephel Dûath fell steeply in great cliffs down into a dark trough, on the further side of which there rose another ridge, much lower, its edge notched and jagged with crags like fangs that stood out black against the red light behind them: it was the grim Morgai, the inner ring of the fences of the land. Far beyond it, but almost straight ahead, across a wide lake of darkness dotted with tiny fires, there was...

'This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,' claimed the historical novelist Alfred Duggan, reviewing The Lord of the Rings when it was published. But I've read it through LOADS of times and now I'm blogging my latest re-read, so what did he know? And so we come to Minas Tirith, Tower of Guard, citadel of Gondor, seven tiers of fancy white fortifications built against a buttress of Mount Mindolluin, with the Tower of Ecthelion rising a thousand feet above the plain. It seems to me the template on which a whole genre of knock-off fantasy cities has been based - I guess Robert E Howard and people wrote about such places before Tolkien, and perhaps there were cities of equal grandeur on Barsoom, but when concept art threads on Instagram throw up unlikely gold and marble castles built on mountaintops and over waterfalls they always look distinctly Minas Tirithy to me. I'm wondering now if London in Mortal Engines was subconsciously echoin...

I'm rereading The Lord of the Rings for the eleventy-first time, and blogging my thoughts about it. You lucky people... So Gollum has led Sam and Frodo to the Black Gate of Mordor, and they've found it shut. They turn south, and their weary journey continues - they have no food except the Elvish Lembas they brought from Lorien, which is getting a bit samey. The landscape is still dreary and ruinous, and now that they are so close to Sauron's stronghold the Ring on its chain round Frodo's neck is getting heavier and heavier - his growing weariness and Sam's concern for him are constant themes in these chapters. First sight of Ithilien, by Ted Nasmith But as always in The Lord of the Rings , after an ordeal there comes respite, a rest, and usually a meal. It seems unlikely that the hobbits will find anywhere to rest so close to Mordor's borders, yet they do: the wooded countryside of Ithilien, which has only recently fallen under the Enemy's control, ...

I'm re-reading The Lord of the Rings . Tremble before the hotness of my takes... The Uffington White Horse, c/o Wikipedia Q: How cool are the Riders of Rohan? A: Extremely cool. They combine the outfits and culture of the Anglo Saxons with the expert horsemanship and healthy outdoor lifestyles of the Sioux or the Apache. They were always my favourites when I was young, and now that I'm very much no longer young the only problem I can see with them is that they make the Gondor crowd in The Return of the the King look a bit dull by comparison. But we haven't reached The Return of the King yet: we're still on Book One of The Two Towers , and if you're still reading this, thank you so much! We left Merry and Pippin marching off to war with the Ents, so now it's time for the narrative to loop back to Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, who have just met a strange old man in another part of the forest. The strange old man turns out to be Gandalf, who has much impor...

 These are some idle lockdown musings based on a re-read of The Lord of the Rings . Don't @ me. A 1976 Athena poster designed by Jimmy Cauty (who was only 17 when he drew it.) When I read The Lord of the Rings as a child it came from the library, and there would always be an annoying wait before I could find the next volume. Nowadays, I can go straight from The Fellowship of the Ring into The Two Towers , and the change of pace is remarkable. The Fellowship … started off at a slow ramble, but The Two Towers sets off at a run. The opening sentence is 'Aragorn sped on up the hill.' and the opening chapter is shorter than any in The Fellowship... More importantly, for the first time none of the central characters are hobbits. Frodo and Sam have headed off to Mordor and won’t be heard of again until Book Two, while Merry and Pippin have been nabbed by the orcs. Pausing only to give a suitable send-off to Boromir, who has redeemed himself for his attempt to grab the Ring...