ARTIST LEE BRINGS MIDDLE-EARTH TO LIFE
Illustrator has a longtime connection to Tolkien’s lasting love story
Beren and Lúthien J.R.R. Tolkien, illustrations by Alan Lee HarperCollins
For more years than he can probably remember, Alan Lee has shared his life with orcs, dragons, elves, sorcerers, hobbits and assorted other creatures from the world of J.R.R. Tolkien.
He loves them all. Indeed, the famed illustrator of the literature of Middle-earth even recalls with pleasure the doorknobs he designed for Saruman’s tower in the award-winning film version of The Lord of the Rings.
But these days, he has particular affection for two creatures he has brought to visual life in Beren and Lúthien, an epic Middle-earth tale that obsessed Tolkien so powerfully that he was driven to create version after version over the decades.
This account of the love between Beren, a common mortal, and Lúthien, the immortal daughter of the Elvin King, is now available in its assorted incarnations in an elegant new volume published by HarperCollins. And your eye is immediately drawn to the magnificent wolfhound created by Alan Lee for the book jacket.
This is Huan — the “large and faithful hound” who becomes the friend and saviour of Beren and Lúthien in the course of their perilous adventures.
“These creatures become pretty real to me, really,” the 70-year-old Lee says. “I think they are a superior class of fantasy being because of Tolkien’s interest in mythology. Virtually everything he creates has some kind of pedigree.”
When he started imagining what Huan would look like, Lee immediately thought of an Irish wolfhound — but he still sought the approval of the Tolkien’s 92-year-old son, Christopher, who has edited the new book. “I got a message back saying that yes, Huan was meant to be an Irish wolfhound.”
The other creature capturing Lee’s imagination is a demon cat — Tevildo by name — who is one of the most surprising presences in the Tolkien canon. Tevildo makes his memorable emergence in the earliest version of Beren and Lúthien, written a century ago. Lee found Tolkien’s description irresistible: “Coal-black and evil to look upon … His purr was like the roll of drums and his growl like thunder, but when he yelled in wrath, small beasts and birds were frozen as in stone.”
Lee considers Tevildo “a pretty unique creation” given that he doesn’t seem to have emerged from Tolkien’s mythic universe. Furthermore, later treatments of the Beren and Lúthien story see Tevildo morphing into that formidable Tolkienian villain, Sauron — “… master of wolves whose shivering howl oft echoed in the hills.”
Lee, one of the world’s most admired exponents of fantasy art, provides nine sumptuous colour plates for the new book, along with an array of striking blackand-white sketches. He became indelibly identified with Middleearth when he was commissioned to provide illustrations for the special edition of The Lord of the Rings published in 1992 to commemorate the centenary of Tolkien’s birth. Then came an invitation from director Peter Jackson to help design the film trilogy. Jackson, who was shooting in New Zealand, wanted Lee and Canadian artist John Howe to “visualize” Tolkien’s world for film.
“Peter Jackson invited us out initially for six months,” Lee says. “I ended up staying for six years and then returning for another six years on The Hobbit.”
He’s speaking from his Devon home on the edge of Dartmoor, a prehistoric wonderland that has long fuelled Lee’s creative imagination and whose otherworldliness helps explain the lure of Middle-earth.
Lee feels a keen sense of responsibility to the Tolkien legacy. One critic recently described him as the “window” through whom most people view Tolkien’s universe. Lee has also won acclaim for other book assignments — including the cover art for Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast — but he says Middle-earth became crucial to his artistic growth from the time he first read Lord of the Rings at the age of 17.
“I felt completely at home in it from the first page,” he says. “I was just besotted. I lived in that world. It fed into my visual imagination.”
Little did he realize back then that Tolkien would become the “centrepiece” of his professional career. The indebtedness he feels toward Middle-earth explains his readiness to act as proxy to an aging Christopher Tolkien on behalf of Beren and Lúthien, a fairy story rooted in two realities — the horrors of the First World War and J.R.R. Tolkien’s love for his wife, Edith.
The two had fallen in love when she was 19 and he 16. They finally married when Tolkien was 24, a few months before he was dispatched to the carnage of the Somme in 1916.
Tolkien survived that horror, and in 1917, while still on active service, began work on the earliest version of Beren and Lúthien.
“It seems to have had a very powerful place in his mythological system — and a very personal place,” Lee says. “He had drawn his inspiration partly from his wife dancing in the woodland when he was convalescing from the trenches of the First World War.”
The result — a striking moment in the text when Beren is transfixed by the sight of the Elven Lúthien dancing in a magical glade. The scene provided the kernel for a story that sees Lúthien’s disapproving father send the young lovers on a series of dangerous assignments that Beren must fulfil if he is to marry his Elvin love. Their most perilous mission is to rob that embodiment of pure evil, Morgoth, of a priceless jewel.
The story has already figured in other Middle-earth literature, including The Silmarillion. But here it has been brought into bolder and more complex relief as Christopher Tolkien shows how, in the decades that followed, the story kept undergoing processes of revision and evolution — even re-emerging at one point as a narrative poem.
“It’s not as if he was trying to produce one final version,” Lee says. “He just keeps finding more in the story that he wants to develop.”
It was a love story that consumed Tolkien to the end of his life. And if you want to know why, the answer can be found in the Oxford cemetery where he and Edith are buried. Their gravestone also carries the names of Beren and Lúthien.