Meditations on Middle-Earth (24 page)

Tim:
Tolkien was something of a frustrated illustrator himself. You could see it in his prose descriptions, as he tried to nail down those scenes to the minutest detail. I can’t get into the guy’s head . . . and I wouldn’t want to!

Greg:
I doubt that our representation of Tolkien’s world would have succeeded for him.

Tim:
But if we were to start all over again, there are certain things we would do totally differently today. For instance, the Rivendell painting in the 1977 Tolkien Calendar now looks too Disneyesque to me—it looks like Pinocchio’s house or the Seven Dwarfs’ house or something. Today we’d make it much more elaborate and imposing—more like an art nouveau, art deco combination with Frank Lloyd-Wright.

We’d probably also make the Balrog in the 1977 Calendar more like Tolkien described it. It would look pretty cool with flames coming off it.

Greg:
The thing is, when you read the Balrog passage, it’s really just a dark shape surrounded by flame. So we compromised in order to “solidify” the figure. Right, wrong, or indifferent, good or bad, that’s what we did. We really couldn’t depict it the way it was described because it was just a dark shadow—like many of Tolkien’s evildoers—surrounded by flame. We had to make it a three-dimensional solid figure standing in front of Gandalf. The description was kind of vague—wings, a mane of fire.

But Lester never disagreed with our interpretation of the Balrog. It was a great time, because the people at Ballantine pretty much let us do our own thing, which, in retrospect, was really pretty amazing.

Tim:
The Lord of the Rings was already established as a cult phenomenon, and was experiencing a second-generation renaissance. Remember in the New York subways—“Frodo lives!”? Initial fan reaction to the calendar was exceptional. It was huge—it overwhelmed us.

Greg:
If Ballantine received any negative letters, we never saw them. For the most part, people were in sync with our interpretation.

Tim
: All the letters we received expressed pretty much the same thing: “You painted it just the way I imagined it!”

Greg:
That’s what we’ve heard more than anything over the years. Our fans keep asking if we’ll ever collect into one book every Tolkien-related illustration we’ve ever created. We’ve finally put one together called
Greg and Tim Hildebrandt: The Tolkien Years
(Watson-Guptill, 2001). It not only contains all of our original paintings, but some never-before-published ones as well. We also just painted a cover for the book, and a centerfold based on photos we took in 1977 for what would have been the fourth Tolkien calendar. So I guess you
can
go home again.

Tim
: The centerfold is a rendition of “The Siege of Minas Tirith.” The painting that appeared in the 1977 Tolkien Calendar was originally planned to be a much larger depiction of the dramatic battle. But due to looming deadline pressures, we were forced to scale down the painting to the version that saw print. Now we finally had the chance to do it right!

Greg:
We shifted the camera angle a bit, and threw a whole bunch of stuff into the painting.

Tim
: There are ores, elves, armies, and oliphaunts, all surrounded by walls of flame. Like I said, there’s no literal interpretation of the subject matter, but it’s as if there’s some spirit there that overtakes us when we do this stuff.

Greg:
I remember approaching the original material with total artistic integrity, putting ourselves completely into the scene and seeing the reality of that world.

Tim:
Hal Foster, Walt Disney,
Pinocchio
—all the visual stimulation that inspired us as kids now had a vessel in which to launch.

Greg:
By the third calendar, we had decided that The Lord of the Rings should be a live-action movie, and we should be its art directors. So we assembled a lot of the art and started to shoot it. We showed Ian Summers our proposal, but he told us that Ralph Bakshi already had the rights to it. So we dropped it.

We decided that we’d do our own thing, but we had to make sure that it could be done as a movie. That was how we started
Urshurak
. We were projecting a film that we wanted to make, but Ian Summers insisted that it first had to be done as a book.

Tim: Urshurak
was our epic fantasy quest. We felt that the trilogy lacked certain qualities for a modern movie audience. So we put a mingling of races and different cultures into our own story.

Greg:
And heroic women took the spotlight. There were very few in Tolkien’s work. What were there, three—maybe four—only one gets in on the action, disguised as a man! That was a big issue for us.

Tim:
We conceived
Urshurak
visually because we wrote it by doing storyboards like they do for animation. We would draw actual floor plans of the buildings in which the action took place.

We like to think that our world was as visually complete in our minds as Tolkien’s Middle-earth was structurally complete in his. We created maps, graphs, time charts, as well as different styles of architecture for the different realms in
Urshurak
.

Greg:
At a presentation to the William Morris Agency in 1978, film producer Joseph E. Levine applauded our presentation but told us it would cost $145 million to produce. Even with special-effects genius John Dykstra onboard, we couldn’t sell the project. But we’re still proud of the book and of Jerry Nichols’ writing, because we did it first and foremost for ourselves. It’s similar to the claim that Tolkien’s success lies in the fact that he created his world first for himself and for others only afterward.

Tim:
It’s like our approach to painting. You have to satisfy yourself first and hope that other people will be just as satisfied.

Greg:
Half of the artistic process is internal—what the artist puts into it. But the other half is external—how the audience reacts to it. That’s what places Tolkien on the high pedestal of art and literature.

Tim:
If I remember correctly, Tolkien had built his world long before he ever made a dime off it. He wasn’t even thinking about getting it published. It was his buddy, C. S. Lewis, who urged him to send it to a publisher.

I know that if I weren’t painting today, I probably wouldn’t be alive—and I’m sure that’s how Tolkien felt about writing.

Greg:
Doing it mainly to satisfy yourself is the criterion of real art versus commercial art.

Tim:
Commercial artists primarily must be concerned with the target audience’s reaction.

Greg:
Tolkien’s work in particular presents an incredible opportunity for self-expression. There was a freedom of expression here that we didn’t have up to this point.

Tim:
Nobody told us what style to paint in or how they wanted it done. At Ballantine, they let us do what we wanted to do, and evidently they were very pleased with the result.

Greg:
One of the things I remember clearly about working on the The Lord of the Rings was that there was no commercial sense about it at Ballantine. That’s rare nowadays. Everyone there was involved in The Lord of the Rings because they loved it. And they left us alone because they could see that we were passionate about it, too. And that passion ignited a fire all across the world. The last calendar ultimately sold over a million copies, which was unheard of back then. Our calendars started a proliferation of calendars in the marketplace. Epic fantasy departments in bookstores also boomed as a result of Tolkien, and maybe our calendars had something to do with that. Many fans have told us that our calendars actually introduced them to The Lord of the Rings, not the other way around.

Tim:
If that’s true, then I consider it an honor, a deep honor to have enhanced the fanfare of Tolkien’s Ring with our art. Let’s face it, we were already successful illustrators when we dumped our green garbage bags at Ballantine. . . .

Greg:
But the calendars gave us a fan following that we never had before. Prior to Tolkien, we were known professionally and commercially by art directors and publishers. But Tolkien brought us worldwide recognition. We received tons of fan mail from all over the globe.

Tim:
We had never done pure fantasy-genre illustrations before. I feel that Tolkien’s work stands at the summit of the fantasy genre. In my opinion, The Lord of the Rings is the best epic fantasy ever written. Not that I’m an authority on literature or anything, but you’ve got to go a long way to even come close to Tolkien’s genius. Anyone trying to compete with Tolkien would have some mighty big shoes to fill.

Greg:
This was an all-new genre of art that we had never considered exploring. Tolkien opened up a new world of possibilities for us as artists, which subsequently introduced us to other exciting possibilities, including the possibility of creating our own worlds.

Tim:
Who had ever thought about “fantasy” as being serious art?

Greg:
Tolkien’s work inspired us to push ourselves, to develop a new style that we had never before approached. It was a style of light and color, which the world has come to know us for. And we didn’t have to push hard—somehow the subject matter made it all come naturally for us. By illustrating Tolkien, I was really able to open up and explore the use of light and color.

Tim:
Because that’s what the story is all about—light versus dark. Before Tolkien, we were really limited in what we could do as far as children’s book illustrations. We could either do realistic, anthropomorphic animals or just straight cartoons.

Greg:
Tolkien allowed us to approach a fantasy world with a realistic interpretation, and to draw from some of our greatest inspirations: N. C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, even Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Raphael, and Michelangelo!

Tim:
Part of me wishes we could go back again.

Greg:
If we did, we’d do it over, and we’d do it better! J. R. R. Tolkien deserves only the best.

ON TOLKIEN
AND FAIRY-
STORIES

TERRI WINDLING

I
propose to speak about fairy-stories,” begins a famous essay by J. R. R. Tolkien; and I can do no better than to echo the good professor’s words today. I propose to speak about fairy-stories, and why these stories mattered to Tolkien. And why such stories, including Tolkien’s own fairy-stories, have mattered to me.

In 1938, Tolkien was still best known as an Oxford language scholar; his children’s tale,
The Hobbit
, had only just been published the year before, and he’d barely begun the long years of work on his adult epic, The Lord of the Rings. That year, Tolkien composed his essay “On Fairy-stories” as an Andrew Lang Lecture, delivered at the University of St. Andrews (subsequently published in 1947.)
¹
In this essay, Tolkien made a learned attempt to define the nature of fairy tales, examine theories of their origin, and refute the notion that magical stories are the special province of children. Essentially, he was arguing the case for his own future masterwork, restoring magical fiction to its place in the adult literary tradition.

The association of children and fairy-stories, Tolkien pointed out, was an accident of domestic history. He compared such tales to old tables and chairs that were banished to the nursery because adults no longer wanted them, nor cared if they were misused. Fairy tales, he noted, are not necessarily stories about fairies, but stories about Fairy, or Faerie: the twilight realm where fairies exist. Many fairy tales contain no such creatures at all; they are tales of magic and marvels, and of ordinary men and women whose lives are transformed by enchantment. He likens fairy-stories to a pot of soup into which mythology, romance, history, hagiography, folk tales, and literary creations have all been tossed together and left to simmer through the centuries. Each story-teller drips into this soup when writing or recounting magical tales—the best of which have slipped right back into the collective pot. Shakespeare added to the soup with
The Tempest
and
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, as did Chaucer, Mallory, Spenser, Pope, Milton, Blake, Keats, Yeats, and numerous other writers whose works were never intended for children.

It was only in the nineteenth century that magical literature and art was pushed into the nursery—ironically, at a time when adult interest in them could not have been higher. Prior to this, ancient epics and myths held a central place in the literary arts, while their country cousins, folk and fairy tales, were told to young and old alike. When fairy tales moved from the oral to the literary tradition, they did so as adult stories. In the West, the earliest published tales we know come from sixteenth-century Italy: Giovan Francesco Straparola’s
The Pleasant Nights
and Giambattista Basile’s
The Pentamerone
. Both volumes were sophisticated works published for educated adults; the stories they contained were sensual, violent, and complex. In the old versions of
Sleeping Beauty
, for instance, the princess is wakened not by a chaste kiss, but by the twins she gives birth to after the prince has come, fornicated with her sleeping body, and left again. Another prince claims Snow White’s dead body and locks himself away with it; his mother, complaining of the dead girl’s smell, is relieved when she returns to life. Cinderella doesn’t sit weeping in the cinders while talking bluebirds flutter around her; she is a clever, angry, feisty girl who seeks her own salvation. In the seventeenth century, fairy tales were taken up by the avante garde in France, particularly women authors who were barred from the French Academy. Parisian writers dressed up old peasant folk tales in fashionable silks and jewels, using fairy tales to slyly critique aristocratic life. (So popular was this art form that when the French stories were finally collected, they filled up forty-one volumes of a work called
Les Cabinet de Fées.)
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the German Romantics (Goethe, Tieck, Novalis, de la Motte Fouqué, etc.) created works with mystical themes inspired by myths and fairy tales, while their countrymen, the Brothers Grimm, prepared their famous, influential volume,
German Popular Stories
. Works by the German Romantics were highly popular in nineteenth-century England, and the first English translation of the Grimms’ collection (in 1823) fanned the fire of Victorian interest in all things magical and fey.