Tolkien’s drawings reveal a wizard at work

Writing convincing fantasy fiction is harder than it looks, argued J.R.R. Tolkien in an essay in 1947. Any old writer, he said, could describe a “green sun”. Many of them could even imagine it. But building a fantasy world “inside which the green sun will be credible…will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft.” Tolkien himself was undoubtedly born with that “elvish craft”, as an exhibition at the Morgan Library in New York makes clear. To help him create a believable “Middle-earth”, the setting for “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit”, Tolkien produced hundreds of drawings and maps. They grounded his stories and helped him to keep track of thousands of years of history, sprawling geographies and complex languages.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who was born in South Africa in 1892 and moved to England when he was four, began dreaming up fantasy worlds as a child. His mother Mabel, who died when he was 12, had instilled in him a love of art and language, and taught him Latin and Greek. As a teenager, Tolkien added Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Gothic to his repertoire. At Oxford University, where he studied English, he began inventing a language (which would later form the basis of “Elvish”) and sketching imaginary landscapes, although as far as we know, he didn’t write any stories until after he graduated in 1915. A decade later, by which time he was an academic and father, he would tuck himself away in his study at the end of the day to work on his evolving “Legendarium”, writing stories and poems and drawing ever-more intricate landscapes. His debut novel, “The Hobbit”, some of which first appeared in his children’s bedtime stories, was published in 1937. Its maps, endpapers and dustjacket were illustrated by Tolkien himself.

Middle-earthly powers The dustjacket for the first edition of “The Hobbit” (Image © The Tolkien Estate)

This exhibition is a slightly more compact version of last year’s at the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford, where Tolkien studied and taught, and where the bulk of his archive is stored. It brings together original manuscripts of “The Hobbit”, “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Silmarillion” with illustrations and maps that take you right inside his Legendarium. Walking through it, you feel as though you’re peering over his shoulder in his study, watching an elvish conjuror at work. In Tolkien’s hands, fantasy has never seemed more real.