Lord of the Rings

When I was a kid, the face of fantasy was Darrell K. Sweet. He seemed by far to be the most prolific cover artist of the 80s, and his work graced many of the most famous and widely available titles as well, including, of course, the covers to the Tolkien books that were readily available when I was young, like The Hobbit, the three volumes of Lord of the Rings, and Unfinished Tales. The copy I bought of The Silmarillion in that era did not have his art, but he probably was on at least one printing that I don't have. He also did the covers for the Xanth novels, the Recluse novels, the Thomas Covenant novels and even The Wheel of Time novels, although he passed away before the last one came out (as did the author; the last two volumes were finished by Brandon Sanderson.) Although I think of him as a fantasy book cover illustrator, that wasn't the extent of his work. He did lots of stand-alone works, and books that I never read and therefore don't really remember, although his style still sunk in my zeitgeist in that role. He also did plenty of science fiction titles; the James Hogan's 2001-inspired Inherit the Stars and the rest of that series, for instance, or some of Alan Dean Foster's Pip and Flinx novels, etc.

As I continue my discussion here, I'll put a bunch of his work in this post. There's a lot more Tolkien-related work by Sweet than the book covers would represent; I think he was probably commissioned to do one of the calendars at one point.

All that said, Darrell K. Sweet's iconic cover art is important to my generation of Tolkien readers, but my own visualizations in my head while reading were never very much influenced by them. Rather, I saw Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings movie before I read it (1978 release date) and the Rankin/Bass Return of the King (1980). While both leave much to be desired, and I discovered that very quickly upon first reading the books in 6th grade (I got them for Christmas that year), both also do at least a few things quite well, and at least some of the visual design of both seeped into my consciousness and stuck with me as I've read the books. Repeated readings have not changed that much, neither have the Peter Jackson movies, based on the John Howe and Ted Naismith, in spite of the fact that both clearly were more careful to follow the details of the source material.

On top of that, the songs of the Return of the King have stuck with me; "Frodo of the Nine-Fingers" and "The Bearer of the Ring" and "Where There's a Whip, There's a Way." I can't explain it, but I suspect plenty of people who first discovered the series through the same vector probably agree with me. 

That said, the look of the characters from the Bakshi movie has been hard to root out of my head, and they do mostly follow the descriptions. The casting was actually quite well done; many stage and screen actors had prominent roles. John Hurt was Aragorn, for instance, and Anthony Daniels was Legolas. Quite different from his much more famous appearance as C-3PO. Many of the looks of the landscapes and more were also heavily influenced by both movies; I've never been able to think of Cirith Ungol as looking all that different than the Rankin/Bass portrayal. Even if they pronounced it as Sirith Ungol for some reason. (I've never really understood mispronouncing Tolkien's names. He has detailed discussions in the Appendices to Return of the King that tell you exactly how they're meant to be pronounced. And how to pronounce C is literally the first thing that it says.)

Anyway, I bring all of this up because I just finished an hour or so ago a long-delayed re-reading of the Lord of the Rings, in the new copy that my daughter bought for me earlier this year; the William Morrow Deluxe Pocket boxed set. I had long ago worn out my original copies that I got in the 80s with the Sweet covers. One of my younger brothers had given me his set, which was a mass market paperback set with cover "art" that were character stills from the movie, and which no doubt were published to coincide with that. It had been many years since I'd re-read the Lord of the Rings, because my hobby of reading has taken a beating as I became more involved in work, and raising kids. Now that I'm mostly a 51-year old empty nester with my younger boys in college and my older kids married, I'm rediscovering it, or at least doing quite a bit more of it than I have in a long time. It used to be that I re-read the Lord of the Rings pretty regularly. I've probably read it all of twenty times. But I've also probably only read it twice or so (not counting this most recent) in the last twenty years. It was magnificent to re-read it. I had forgotten how much I loved it.

A few curious details. Sometimes people talk about the Lord of the Rings as if it should be considered a single novel. I find this curious, because it's almost always published as three books (four, of course, because it's usually bundled with The Hobbit, as is my copy.) This is a pretty nice copy; stitch bound, with a vinyl cover on each book, and all are slightly different shades of earth tones. It's not the nicest copy available; my son-in-law actually has the ~$400 leather bound Easton Press editions, which are the nicest, but it's still a pretty nice copy, and nice enough that at this point in my life, I doubt I'll have any need to ever replace it in my lifetime. 

One interesting nod to the idea of the book being all one book (I've never really accepted that, even if Tolkien himself believed it. It's a three-volume trilogy, and always has been.) is that it has continuous pagination through the three volumes of Lord of the Rings. It is in three volumes, as you'd expect, but The Two Towers doesn't start again on page one, like my earlier copies have, it starts on page 400 something, which is the next number after Fellowship of the Ring ends. It also has the Stephen Raw maps that I remember, which were redrawn in higher definition, but very closely hewed to the original Christopher Tolkien maps that were originally published with the books earlier. Stephen Raw was commissioned to draw them not because there was any change wanted to the maps, other than that they wanted clearer originals that they could print in reduced mass market format and have them be more legible. Raw was commissioned in the mid-90s, and worked closely with Christopher Tolkien. It actually took me quite some time to recognize that the maps in my newer printings were different than the ones that I had seen before by Christopher; he really tried very closely to replicate the original, or maybe to restore them, in a way. Of course, my copies of the book are a little on the small side, so even so it's not super great trying to refer to it, but I do have really good high definition Middle-earth maps that I've found over the years on my hard drive. If you can still find it, although I think the artist no longer distributes it because when Peter Jackson's trilogy was announced he worried about copyright being brought to bear against him, Star Dogg's high definition map is probably the best one. But I do have high definition Stephen Raw and even Christopher Tolkien maps that I've collected online; the Christopher Tolkien being the famous one that was first published with Unfinished Tales in poster form; black ink for features and red for names and labels.

Of course, if you don't mind being online, there's an interactive Middle-earth map that's quite good too.

But enough about the physical copy itself. What else did I notice about reading The Lord of the Rings again after so many years and so much thinking about authorship and structure of books (among other things that I've thought a lot about.) Structurally, and this is no secret, but I probably hadn't really thought about it as much as I did this time, the Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit, for that matter) is written as a lot of vignettes interspersed with travel montages. The pattern is usually travel, stop and focus, then travel again, then stop and focus. Most of these stops are "homely houses" where homely in Tolkien's version of English doesn't mean what it does to us Americans. Rather than being ugly or plain, it mains welcoming and home-like. Even on the very borders of Mordor itself, Frodo and Sam find a homely house in the form if Faramir's hide-out in Ithilien. In most of these homely houses, the characters find unexpected allies that become friendly and helpful very quickly, give them counsel and other help, and send them again on their way. Frodo and Sam weren't the only ones to do this, Merry and Pippin at Wellinghall with Treebeard qualifies as well. 

I'm not sure that I love this structure, or at least that I think anyone else should mimic it. It is repetitive unless done extremely carefully and extremely well, and I doubt most writers who are not Tolkien could pull it off. Most writers have action and tension still in the destinations themselves, rather than just character and world-building expositions and dialogue, at places meant to be places of rest, primarily. 

Besides that, though, I think that Tolkien's skill with travel sequences is almost unparalleled. I read in awe this time around as I paid attention to the structure and how he wrote. I couldn't do it, and I doubt many other authors could either. I'm kind of curious, having just re-read all of that, to see how its done in some of the other books that I have in my queue. The Riftwar Saga has a fair bit of traveling, if I recall. I'd really like to see how its done there and pay more specific attention to the structure of the writing, for instance.

In fact, and I've said this many times before, Tolkien's particular linguistic skill makes him able to write in a way that no other author that I'm aware of who's put to pen to paper in the fantasy genre can do. And not just the language; Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott could certainly imitate a Medieval mode, but Tolkien was able to give the sense of Medievalism without actually being Medieval. It's a brilliant hybrid of Medievalist and modern style. But no, what I also mean is that he understands folklore, mythology and the rest of the material, and why its timeless more than anyone else. Most of the Tolkien pastiche that was super popular in fantasy in the 70s, 80s and 90s was fundamentally modern, and only superficially touched on any of those themes, tropes, or deeper meanings. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing; although what it suggests to me is that fantasy is sometimes best served by not standing too close to the shadow of Tolkien. Nobody else has, to my knowledge, ever really come close to honestly recreating what he did, and they look the poorer for it. Nobody seems to ride down Robert E. Howard because he wasn't writing Tolkien pastiche. In part this was because Howard was also similarly more talented than most of his imitators, but also because his own approach to the genre was completely different than Tolkien's, so it's a little hard to see them as competing head to head for the same kind of appeal to the same kind of audience exactly. People may tend to like both of them, but they do so for primarily different reasons.

Other features may even be seen to be somewhat primitive. The foreshadowing is really on the nose about a lot of things. Then again, surprise twists and subverting expectations was, no doubt, among the last goals that Tolkien had in mind.

And I did say that Sweet's illustrations rarely looked like the descriptions of the characters, right? Well, Gandalf is OK here, and the three hobbits, while indistinguishable from each other, are clearly the three hobbits. Gimli is OK too (although the books talk of him openly wearing a coat of mail.) But who's that man with the weird long feather in his helmet supposed to be? Boromir, or Aragorn? He doesn't really look to me like either. Of course, if you think that looks funky, check out this image of Thorin before the Wood-elf king from The Hobbit!

I think a lot of my love for the iconic images of a Sweet cover are more based on nostalgia than anything else. He obviously had some talent, but it is more and more difficult to actually recognize the subjects of the painting in them the more you look at them. He seems to have had only a very vague idea of what the texts that he's illustrating are actually supposed to be like sometimes. Does that second image above look like Frodo and Sam on the slopes of Mount Doom, with Barad-dur (I presume) in the background looking like it's only a quarter mile or so away instead of many leagues? And why is Gollum following them? And why does he have a dog snout? And yet, that's what it says the image is. Maybe it's mistitled and its really supposed to be climbing the stair up to Cirith Ungol? Even so, that's not really a great rendition of what's described.