Illustrating Our Imaginations

“Whenever I want to impress someone with my inherited nerdiness, I tell them about how my parents used to read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings aloud to my brother, Zach, and I. Why we embarked on this journey and how many years it took, I can’t say. I do know it took place during our formative years and I remember the story and the way the books looked perfectly. They were thick hardcovers, spines sometimes cracking from the weight of the pages, and I remember The Lord of the Rings beginning with Tolkien’s poetic epigraph which I memorized and took to reciting:

“Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.”

This was before Peter Jackson’s movies rendered Middle Earth in painstaking detail and all Zach and I had to fuel our imaginations were Tolkien’s words and a hardcover book of illustrations called The Realms of Tolkien, a compilation of scenes interpreted by different artists. The best were by Alan Lee, whose watercolors we easily recognized. That’s not Alan Lee’s Balrog. Why are you looking at that one? Where is Galadriel? No, the good one….”

March column about Alan Lee, Tolkien’s realms, and how we imagine.

Full text at Epiphany Magazine, audio below.