Meditations on Middle-Earth (23 page)

But when I read my advanced copy I despaired, and not just because I thought the book was derivative and the language clunky. I feared that no one would buy this thing, that we had ordered far too many copies and that they would all have to be returned, with us paying the postage on what was, after all, a fairly hefty tome (though nothing like the toe-crushers that followed). The bookstore had just opened, and a little thing like postage was a huge expense in those days.

To my absolute surprise, the book began to sell, and sold without ceasing. We got rid of the entire dump and had to pick up more copies at our local book distributor. I was in a bit of a quandary, though, when our customers asked me if it was any good, and ended up saying something like, “If one of the things you enjoyed about Tolkien was his language, you won’t like this. But if you read Tolkien only for the story, you will find this very much like that, maybe too much so.” To a man and a woman, they bought the book.

Then the floodgates opened. Hundreds of epic fantasies, maybe even thousands, have been published since then. People realized that they could write them without paying attention to style, that they didn’t have to spend decades building a world, but could make one out of cheap cardboard, or, even simpler, could borrow it from a better writer. Some of these books were so bad they wouldn’t even make decent landfill. And these, too, were bought and eagerly devoured.

It’s the story: the story is the important thing. People are so hungry for these tales that they will read them and make them best-sellers no matter how badly written they are. Some of them are poor retellings, but such is the power of the hero’s journey that people will read them anyway. Even Hollywood has gotten into the act. Because of the success of
Star Wars
, which was inspired in part by
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
, you can hear Armani-suited, sunglass-wearing, cell-phone-toting producers talk with straight faces about the hero’s journey. Or, as someone I know who works there said, “If I have to hear Joseph Campbell’s name in this town one more time . . .”

So am I wrong about epic language? I still don’t think so, though I admit to being crochety about the subject. People
do
enjoy a well-written book, even if they don’t realize why they are getting that bit of extra enjoyment at the time. (A sort of subliminal suggestion, you might say.) More importantly, though, how many of these recent fantasies will stand the test of time? How many will people be reading a hundred years from now?

Very few, I think. But if the twenty-second century has any taste at all, they will still be reading Tolkien. They will marvel at his gift for storytelling, his solidly constructed world, his understanding of beauty and terror. And at his language. That language is one of the things that make him a true mythmaker. We have had precious few mythmakers in our time, and we should honor him. I’m glad we are.

“The Radical
Distinction. . .”
A CONVERSATION
WITH TIM AND GREG
HILDEBRANDT

GLENN HURDLING

T
im:
It was 1967, so I was twenty-eight. Greg and I were making films on world hunger for Bishop Fulton J. Sheen for the Society of the Propagation of the Faith in New York City. I had done a watercolor painting of a dwarf skipping over a bridge by a tree when a girl in the office—her name was Winifred Boyle—saw it and said that it reminded her of Tolkien. I said, “What’s a Tolkien?”

The next day she handed me
The Hobbit
. I was totally hooked the moment I began to read it. I devoured The Lord of the Rings next. I had never read anything like it in my life—before or after. To me, it is still the alpha and the omega of the fantasy genre.

Vivid pictures would pop into my head every time I turned a page. Greg and I weren’t illustrators yet, so the possibility of illustrating the The Lord of the Rings seemed a bit absurd. But something about the thought stuck in my head, and I said, “I’ve got to paint this some day.”

Then we got into illustrating, and one thing led to another. On Christmas morning, 1974, my wife Rita gave me the 1975 Tolkien Calendar, illustrated by Tim Kirk. A blurb on the back of the calendar announced that Ballantine Books was seeking new artists to illustrate the following year’s calendar. I leaped out of my slippers.

I began to spend most of my free time painting castles and gnarled trees, always with Tolkien in the back of my mind.

Greg:
I didn’t read the books until 1975, despite Tim’s insistence that I do so over the years. Up till then we had been doing illustrations for kids’ books—for Disney and Sesame Street, panda and hippopotamus books for Golden Books, and even a book on toilet training! None of these things had any bearing on fantasy whatsoever. But at least by then we had become illustrators. We weren’t necessarily doing the subject matter we wanted to do, but we were making a living doing what we did best.

I had been concentrating on painting my own images, with dreams of having my own gallery show in New York City. I wanted to break away from illustrating someone else’s ideas, so I had no desire to read The Lord of the Rings at all.

When Tim showed me the announcement on the back of that calendar, I put my desire for a gallery show on hold. I realized that I had a family to feed, so I finally gave in and read the trilogy. I was blown away! For the next three years, I immersed myself in a world of hobbits, wizards, dwarves, and elves.

Tim:
We started to do sample sketches to show Ballantine right after I showed Greg the announcement. After a month and a half of sketching, we headed into New York. We didn’t have a portfolio big enough to put any of our sample character sketches into, so we put them into these big green garbage bags. We brought them in expecting to get an appointment with the art director at Ballantine. We hung around all day and badgered the receptionist until we finally got to see Ian Summers, Ballantine’s art director.

Very few people had illustrated Tolkien up to that point. Ian said that he had looked at a lot of samples, but they had all been submitted by amateurs, kids in school, or fans who scribbled their interpretations of the characters without illustrating any of the classic scenes. No professional artists had come forward except Greg and me. Can you imagine how many remarkable artists would be lined up around the block if a publisher made that announcement today? The line would be a mile long!

Greg:
Tim and I had always read the same things growing up—Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pelucidar stuff, all of H. G. Wells, most of Jules Verne, and Jack London. We also loved comic books and comic strips, such as
Prince Valiant
. But other than that, we weren’t big readers. We were into the visual stuff; we taught ourselves painting and animation by watching Disney films and 1950s science-fiction films. We also loved medieval films, the ones with the cheesy swords and cardboard-aluminum armor. Robert Wagner and James Mason starred in a screen version of
Prince Valiant
that was quite exceptional. The scene in which Vikings attack the castle was one of our inspirations for “The Siege of Minas Tirith” in the 1977 Tolkien Calendar.

Tim:
When we were kids, we believed in flying saucers. We would sit in the basement and create Martians. We also blew up model buildings in my parents’ barn and filmed the blaze with our 8mm movie camera.

Greg:
People thought we were pyromaniacs. And who could blame them? We’d spend a year building a model set, then blow it up!

Tim:
I know our relatives thought we were strange. Our Aunt Gertie believed that we had an idol of Disney in our bedroom and that we burned a candle in front of it every night.

Greg:
With the exception of our parents, our family didn’t get the idea of special effects or visual expression. But we were completely freaked out over Disney and science fiction.
Rocket Ship X-M
was the first science-fiction film we ever saw, then
The Man from Planet X
.

Tim:
That was all visual stimulation, but Tolkien’s work resided in the imagination. I read
The Hobbit
and The Lord of the Rings four times each, and doing so painted good images in my imagination. We wanted to do justice to the books when we illustrated them by paying attention to all of Tolkien’s detailed descriptions.

Greg:
Well, not completely. For instance, Tolkien described Gandalf as having “long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat.” If you read that, it’s one thing; but try to paint it and it looks as goofy as hell.

Tim:
You wouldn’t even do that in a cartoon.

Greg:
And there’s nothing in the books about pointed ears on hobbits. Tolkien said they have “sharp ears,” but nowhere does he say they’re pointed. That was our own visual interpretation.

Tim:
When I read
The Hobbit
the first time, the immediate visual imagery that came to me was of a rabbit character—the name “hobbit,” the furry feet. I think Tolkien made the same analogy, too, when he created the creatures—tiny creatures who live in holes. So we tried to extend that imagery to the ears.

Greg:
There was a debate with Lester Del Rey over the pointed ears; he was the consultant on our calendars. He had a business card that read “expert.” I remember coming in with the painting of Faramir, whose arrow feathers we had painted red. Lester said, “Uh-uh. Green.
The Two Towers
, page 336, paragraph 3.” He debated whether our hobbits should have pointed ears, but he finally gave in. We did the painting of Bilbo, retired at Rivendell, and we put sideburns on him. There was a big discussion about whether hobbits could grow facial hair. But Lester agreed that we could bring the sideburns down into his face as an old man.

EOWYN

The Return of the King

Chapter 6: “The Battle of Pelennor Fields”

The pointed ears on elves, on the other hand, were a traditional interpretation. We gave Legolas blond hair, even though in the book he has dark hair. In
The Fellowship of the Ring
centerpiece of the first calendar, we painted him with blond hair and dressed him in light colors. Lester looked at it and said, “No, he has dark hair . . . but leave it!”

Tim:
We generally stuck pretty close to the colors that Tolkien described. In
The Hobbit
it says that hobbits dress in bright colors—chiefly green and yellow. But I don’t think they’d be wearing those colors if they were going on a dangerous quest. Why would they want to call attention to themselves if they were going to destroy an object of power in the far-off Cracks of Doom?

Greg:
Their party clothes would be brightly colored.

Tim:
I can see them wearing bright colors at parties, like that big party at the beginning of
The Fellowship of the Ring
.

Greg:
Their disco look.

Tim:
Gold buttons, green vests. They probably looked more like leprechauns, really.

Tolkien was never a big supporter of illustration to accompany works of fantasy. In his essay, “On Fairy-stories,” Tolkien said, “However good in themselves, illustrations do little good to fairy-stories. The radical distinction between all art (including drama) that offers a
visible
presentation and true literature is that it imposes one visible form. Literature works from mind to mind and is thus more progenitive.”

I can see where he’s coming from, and I agree to a certain extent. The final piece can never look in reality as it does in your mind.

Greg:
I guess Tolkien and Robert Louis Stevenson would have disagreed. Stevenson was a big, big supporter of visual imagery. He loved illustrations in his books, and he would build his stories to a big visual climax in his writing. He thought in terms of an illustrator. I understand Tolkien’s point of view: you build up an image in your own head. But the challenge and the risk of being an illustrator is taking on an author’s work and doing your take on it, hoping that it hits a soft spot with the fans of the book.