To Illustrate or Not to Illustrate? That is the Question.

Ruth Lacon is a skilled illustrator and calligrapher, highly influenced by early Persian manuscripts. Her work can be seen in The Ruins of Osgiliath, the Nigglins, Amon Hen, Mallorn and in books like for example 'The Uncharted Realms of Tolkien'. The Tale of Gondolin would not have existed as we know it know if Ruth Lancon from Edinburgh had not been inspired by The Fall of Gondolin Song Cycle. In 1993 Ruth Lancon send 17 fine illustrations to Alex Lewis together with the suggestion of publishing The Tale of Gondolin for members of the Tolkien Society. All the rest is history now...

To Illustrate or Not to Illustrate? That is the Question...

But why?  Why is it a question at all?  Anyone new to the world of J. R. R. Tolkien would surely look at my title with utter bemusement. Why should there be any question about whether or not it is right to produce visual images inspired by the writings of  Tolkien?  

Well, the short answer is that there is a debate because J. R. R. Tolkien himself said that he did not want his books to be illustrated – but at the same time, he allowed several of them to be published with illustrations, by himself and by other people.

Even less helpfully, there was no clear line through time as to which way J. R. R. Tolkien felt. He did not start out approving of illustration and then change his mind. In fact, he seems to have felt both ways at once. At the very time when J. R. R. Tolkien was talking to Cor Blok about not wanting his books illustrated in 1961, he was also deep in discussions with Pauline Baynes about the production of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil – with illustrations. We have all too little context for J. R. R. tolkien's statements about illustration, too, a situation whose dangers are the theme of the important guest editorial by Nancy Martsch of Beyond Bree in the latest Mallorn. So how can we possibly make our minds up, when we don't know what the author of the books we love really wanted for them?

I'd like to suggest that one thing we can try to do is to understand what, exactly, J. R. R. Tolkien meant, what he was worried about, and why he felt the way he did. No doubt as ever there are unpublished letters bearing on this in detail that would be really helpful, but I think that we've got enough evidence to work with. I do think we can actually debate those ideas in a useful way, even – especially – though we can no longer ask the author himself. All of us who love J. R. R. tolkien's work , if we want to see his legacy maintained and expanded, need to think hard about questions like this, so that we can take part in an informed and useful debate, instead of getting stuck in an unhelpful stalemate. In what follows, I'm going to take each of these points in turn.

*–*–*

The first point to look at, then, is not what J. R. R. Tolkien said about illustration, but what he did with it. Several books appeared with illustrations in his lifetime and with his approval: The Hobbit (1937), Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962) and Smith of Wootton Major (1967 – twice, in the magazine Redbird and in book form). It is possible that J. R. R. Tolkien thought better of having his images in The Hobbit, judging by his comment to Cor Blok that he did not want his books to appear even with his own artwork in them. That, however, still leaves us with the others. What we can say about all of these is that they are relatively small, short books, and that none of them are in the mainstream of tolkien's work on the 'Matter of Middle-earth'. Bombadil is shoehorned into that, but on any sensible examination it doesn't count.
Otherwise they vary radically. Farmer Giles is a comic quasi-childrens' book; Bombadil was designed expressly as a 'gift book', a precious artefact as much as a reading volume; Smith is an overt 'fairy tale' with hidden depths of thought.
There doesn't seem to be anything in common there. However, if we come at this from another direction, we might see something useful. All these books ended up looking very much as if J. R. R. Tolkien had taken his manuscripts down to Catte Street and set the medieval Oxford School of illuminators to work on them.
To my eyes there's a definite if distant resemblance between William De Brailes' work and that of Pauline Baynes, especially in its original two-colour black-and-red in-text format. There may well also be a link to the sort of thing J. R. R. Tolkien himself did as a calligrapher, based on manuals which in turn drew on from medieval work of the same era.
To my mind, that says that Tolkien was happy to have these works made into precious artefacts attractive to a reader, gift books at once of the medieval and the fin-de siecle sort, by the work of an artist who eschewed photographic realism in favour of the older virtues of content, composition and grace of form.

Given what we know about tolkien's choice of Pauline Baynes for most of these projects, I think we can say that one major reason why J.R.R. Tolkien disapproved of illustration was the great trouble which he and his publishers had in finding illustrators of whose work he approved. It surely did not help that J.R.R. Tolkien  grew up in a veritable 'Golden Age' for book design and illustration (the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries up until the end of the First World War), but published his own writings in an era not just of tight budgets but also of vastly reduced expectations.
 Experiences such as the infamous 'christmas tree and emus' cover of the first American Hobbit cannot have made J.R.R. Tolkien feel kindly about modern standards of artwork in books, and to a large extent, things only got worse as the 1950's gave way to the 1960's. We know that he once said with regard to artwork that, if caught between the Scylla of Disney and the Charybdis of Arthur Rackham, it was better to go to wreck on the Rackham side.
It's hard not to think that if an artist of the calibre of Arthur Rackham himself – or Edmund Dulac, or some of the other fin-de-sieclé 'greats' – had been available, J.R.R. Tolkien might have been less worried about having pictures in his books.

Let me turn back for a moment to the idea that J.R.R. Tolkien was happy to have books such as The Adventures of Tom Bombadil produced as visually pleasing artefacts. Speaking as a book-painter by trade, with a specialist degree to prove it, giving pleasure to the reader is a very old though at times controversial function for added visual imagery in books.
The vast majority of works of fiction in particular which contain illumination and illustration do so in order to add to the pleasure of the experience. This is as much the case whether one looks at a volume of romances from the French medieval court, or a book of poetry from Safavid Persia, or a turn-of-the-century edition of a play or novel. The problem has been that 'mere' pleasure is often seen as a frivolous, even sinful, waste of time. If the only forms of 'proper reading' are supposed to be serious and pictures are 'unserious' (an idea which appeared in Europe in iconoclast Protestant thinking at the Reformation, and then in a modified version crept into Counter-Reformation Catholic thinking), then all books come under strong pressure to look as plain as possible.
There is an important positive side to the function of pleasing the eye, however. It can encourage people to engage with a verbal text which they might never otherwise have read. Fine presentation will not hold a reader to a bad book, nor will it overcome the “Dust and ashes, we don't eat that!” reaction to a book which is 'bad to think' for a particular person.
Potential readers who are 'floating voters', however, may well be encouraged to try a book if it is visually attractive. Smith of Wootton Major, with its massive philosophical and even theological subtext, is actually a very good example of a seemingly 'pretty little thing' which is actually nothing of the sort.
But the pictures draw us in and keep us company along the way, reassuring us that this isn't a hard book, we can enjoy it and understand it. And if we re-read, and learn a little more than just the story, the parable?  Well, that's our choice – but it is made very easy for us. The function of pleasing the eye, then, is one which is obvious and easy to understand, which has important positive aspects in attracting potential readers to a text, yet has a long history of causing trouble for visual imagery in books.
It's one which, on the evidence of his so-called 'minor' works, we can say J. R. R. Tolkien understood well.

*–*–*

Given all that, why would J. R. R. Tolkien turn round and say that 'he did not want his books illustrated'?  Well, this is where our other source of evidence comes in, what Tolkien said rather than what he did.
First, I'd like to quote and examine Cor Blok's valuable recollection, printed in his introduction to the 2011 calendar:
'J. R. R. Tolkien objected to illustrated editions of his books. He wanted readers to be at liberty to form their own mental pictures while reading. We are still seeing Alice through the eyes of John Tenniel and Don Quixote through those of Gustave Doré, and J. R. R. Tolkien did not wish something similar to happen to his Frodo or Gandalf – let alone Sauron.'

The first point to note here is that J. R. R. Tolkien referred only to characters from The Lord of The Rings. If we add in his remark that he did not want even his own artwork used, we can add The Hobbit to that list. Unlike the 'minor works', these are core parts of the 'Matter of Middle-earth' – all, indeed, that would be published in J. R. R. tolkien's lifetime.
So we can say that there is one division, which we can note and perhaps use; that books which J. R. R. Tolkien was happy to see illustrated should continue to be illustrated, while those he did not want illustrated should not be.
The second point enables us to add to and extend that.

Very clearly, J. R. R. tolkien's worry was about overdefinition of his characters by someone else's artwork, constraining the imagination of the reader. Yet if he did not want Frodo of Gandalf 'overdefined' visually, why was he happy to see Smith depicted?  Straightforwardly, as I noted above, Pauline Baynes' art is not realistic in a way that can 'overdefine' any character.

No-one looking at her work could say that they could recognise Smith or Farmer Giles in a police lineup, to a standard that would secure a conviction. We are given a lot of information, true, but it is information approved by the author which could as well be in a verbal, written description in the text. And there is another piece of important information which we can add.
J. R. R. Tolkien approved Pauline Baynes' artwork for the cover and dustjacket of the one-volume 'Yellowspine' edition of The Lord of The Rings, in which all of the Fellowship of the Ring appear, small and indistinct but remarkably recognizable.
He also approved of Cor Blok's work inspired by the same book. So now we can say we have a new proposition: books which J. R. R. Tolkien did not see illustrated in his lifetime might be illustrated, keeping our respect for the author, if we use artists of whose style J. R. R. Tolkien could be expected to approve.

At this stage in our discussion, I think it's worth bringing in a couple of other ideas.
One is a consideration of some of the problems involved in the 'definition of characters by single image' which J. R. R. Tolkien was worried about. The other is the wider state of our visual appreciation of J. R. R. tolkien's works.

Definition of fictional characters by particular artists is actually a highly complex problem. Lewis Carrol's Alice, one of the examples Cor Blok quotes J. R. R. Tolkien as using, is in fact one of the most difficult cases of all.
The image produced for the first edition by the respected artist, political cartoonist and illustrator John Tenniel, was shaped by Lewis Carrol's own image in the underlying manuscript, and that in turn was based on the real girl behind the stories, Alice Liddell. So who is defining what here, to what constraint of viewers' imagination?  Do we blame God or DNA for creating a unique and singular individual, reducing all possible Alice Liddells to one?  Surely not!  In point of actual fact, there have been over three hundred illustrated editions of the Alice books, with versions of the main character from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Tenniel's artwork may be the best known and it may have had wide impact, but that is due largely to the fact that his Alice was the one Lewis Carroll approved. When the book came out of copyright and editions with other artists were proposed, there was a considerable furore. Why, critics at the time complained, would anyone want to change the images which Carroll had decided were so good that he was not going to allow any others?  It was respect for the author's wishes that fostered Tenniel's imagery as the 'standard', which throws a rather different light on the dominance of his ideas.
Other versions have as I said existed in large numbers, and at any one time book-buyers have free choice in which to pick.
The general public does seem to hold an inchoate and usually very uninformed opinion, but one which is ultimately based on lingering support for Carroll as well as modern understandings of who Alice was, that Tenniel's images were 'right'.
That feeling tends to lead book-buyers to prefer, if not Tenniel's originals, then Tenniel-style illustrations to Lewis Carroll.
I would find it hard to argue, in this case, that J. R. R. Tolkien was right and John Tenniel's supporters were wrong.
So what looks like a totally clear-cut case for 'overdetermination' of our ideas of a fictional character by a single artist, dissolves on closer examination into a set of good reasons why that artist's ideas have been supported by both the book-buying public and by other artists.

Overdetermination in the bad sense which J. R. R. Tolkien implied certainly can exist, however. The tragedy of his resistance to illustration and the respect for that feeling shown by his Estate, has been that it has led, not to freedom of imagination for the readers of his work, but to exactly the situation of visual tyranny which J. R. R. Tolkien feared.
The problem for us here and now in 2011 is that it is too late by far to try to keep J. R. R. tolkien's readers visually innocent, reliant only on their own mental resources in imaging as they read; it was already far too late when J. R. R. Tolkien spoke to Cor Blok in 1961. From the very beginning, J. R. R. tolkien's published writings were illustrated, in ways that exercise more or less constraint on readers' imagination depending on the style and scale of illustration.
The impact that this has had can be seen in the number of later artists' versions that adhere to the basic structure of J. R. R. tolkien's own image of Rivendell, despite the fact that it actually doesn't correspond at all with the verbal description in The Hobbit.
At the present moment, until the publication of the Cor Blok calendar, we have been in what I would call the worst of all possible worlds. A single visual version of The Lord of The Rings has become massively dominant, with no real challenge standing against it. I refer, of course, to the motion-picture version of The Lord of The Rings. The 'single visual image' of the films creates what I would call visual allegory, a one-to-one correspondence, matching J. R. R. tolkien's description of verbal allegory in the Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of The Rings.

Once such an image-set exists there is no way to pretend it does not. The genie is out of the bottle; with satellite broadcast, even an alien from outer space is now likely to have seen The Lord of The Rings before they read it.
Our only way to undo that 'single image' constraint now, I would submit, is not to refuse depiction but to unleash it.
In my view the answer to this situation has to be to pick up on J. R. R. tolkien's own concept of verbal applicability, the importance of the availability of choice for the reader in how to interpret a multivalent text.
There really ought to be an equivalent visual applicability, viewer choice among images, preferably as many, as various and as widely available as possible. We cannot get back the visually innocent reader/viewer of J. R. R. tolkien's works; we can realistically hope to encourage reader/viewers to exercise choice among visual images. If that does nothing else, it gets people to think about what they see. In so doing, we might even be able to push the reader-viewer to take the verbal descriptions seriously again, and enlarge the received imagery with their own ideas.
Just saying 'I don't think so-and-so looks like that' actually demonstrates real thought and engagement with the written words of a good and praiseworthy sort.

For me, looked at in this light, Cor Blok's calendars are a huge step in the right direction. We desperately needed something like this – better still, an actual illustrated The Lord of The Rings at radical variance with photographic imagery and the interpretation the film-makers created (would a Pauline Baynes-style in-text approach really have cost that much?) – when the films came out. If something like that had been available, a full-scale, open and formal challenge to how the films visualised J. R. R. tolkien's writings, I really do think that we would have had far, far less of the single-image dominance we've gotten inadvertantly stuck with.
If there had been continual and ongoing production of imagery showcasing different ways to visualise J. R. R. tolkien's writings, that would have reinforced the point massively, and greatly encouraged visual applicability rather than visual allegory.
Given the timescales common to illustration, it is I think too late to hope for something similar to happen to The Hobbit before its movie version appears, unless of course something is already in the pipeline. But I would positively plead for as much direct challenge as possible, as soon as possible. Let us have the film and its memorabilia by all means; but let us have alternatives too – the more the better!  We seriously need to not end up in the sort of static, entrenched positions with which J. R. R. Tolkien himself was too familiar, in both the practical and the philosopical sense.
Instead we need to open up the visual debate, keep it fluid and fast-moving, in a way that allows J. R. R. tolkien's words and their readers to be the real winners.

*–*–*

So far I've been looking at what  J. R. R. Tolkien said. It's time now I think to turn round and ask another question: why?  'He just felt like that' isn't a valid answer here. J. R. R. Tolkien himself wrote, in print in an essay which he himself thought was important, the now-famous On fairy-stories,  on the subject of his opinions about visual art and illustration.
If we're serious about trying to understand our author's opinions, and deciding for ourselves how much weight we can set on them, we need to look at this material in depth. Doing so takes us into the 'lost world' of J. R. R. tolkien's own lifetime (remember that he died in 1973, and then ask yourself how much of your lifespan the time since then takes up, as well as how much has changed in those years), with its very different politics, technologies and ideologies.
It also lets us do something very unusual indeed – through this material, we come as close as I think we ever can to being eavesdroppers to those famous and so sadly ill-recorded Inklings meetings.

I think it's worth quoting this material, as many people may not have read it or have easy access to it. In the main text of On fairy-stories there are a bare three sentences on the subject of visual art:
'In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature. In painting, for instance, the visible presentation of the fantastic image is technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the mind, even to overthrow it. Silliness or morbidity are frequent results.'

This passage carries an original footnote referring to Note E at the end of the essay, which runs as follows:
'There is, for example, in surrealism commonly present a morbidity or unease very rarely found in literary fantasy. The mind that produced the depicted images may often be suspected to have been in fact already morbid; yet this is not a necessary explanation in all cases. A curious disturbance is often set up by the very act of drawing things of this kind, a state similar in quality and consciousness of morbidity to the sensations in a high fever, when the mind develops a distressing fecundity and facility in figure-making, seeing forms sinister or grotesque in all visible objects about it.
I am speaking here, of course, of the primary expressions of Fantasy in 'pictorial' arts, not of 'illustrations'; nor of the cinematograph. 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 more progenitive. It is at once more universal and more poignantly particular.
If it speaks of bread or wine or stone or tree, it appeals to the whole of these things, to their ideas; yet each hearer will give to them a peculiar personal embodiment in his imagination.
Should the story say 'he ate bread', the dramatic producer or painter can only show 'a piece of bread' according to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story will think of bread in general and picture it in some form of his own.
If a story says 'he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below', the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but especially out of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word.'

And finally:
'Endings of this sort suit fairy-stories, because such tales have a greater sense and grasp of the endlessness of the World of Story than most modern 'realistic' stories, already hemmed within the narrow confines of their own small time. A sharp cut in the endless tapestry is not unfittingly marked by a formula, even a grotesque or comic one. It was an irresistible development of modern illustration (so largely photographic) that borders should be abandoned and the 'picture' end only with the paper.
This method may be suitable for photographs; but it is altogether inappropriate for the pictures that illustrate or are inspired by fairy-stories. An enchanted forest requires a margin, even an elaborate border.
To print it coterminous with the page, like a 'shot' of the Rockies in Picture Post, as if it were indeed a 'snap' of fairyland or a 'sketch by our artist on the spot', is a folly and an abuse.'

I've taken all three citations from the text as printed in the 2008 HarperCollins edition, edited by Douglas A. Anderson and Verlyn Flieger. The first is on p.61, beginning of numbered paragraph 70; the second at pp.81-2, Note E, emphases original; the third at pp.83-4, middle para. of Note H.
Now, let's turn back the clock to Oxford in the early 1940's...

Remarkably, illustration and art is one of the very, very few subjects we can say the Inklings really did debate. For all their legendary status, our knowledge of the group is actually very poor. Interest has focussed on the major writers among them, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, while the important point that these three were part of a much larger group, whose wider meetings and discussions must have had an effect on their ideas, has been effectively  lost sight of.
There is one tiny, precious example that shows the visual arts were in fact being considered among the Inklings during the years of the Second World War. The art movement Surrealism crops up in three of their works, treated in the same way and in close proximity of time.
In his major essay On fairy-stories, published in 1947 (as part of a collection of literary-critical papers by the Inklings in memory of Charles Williams), J. R. R. Tolkien makes decidedly weird use of Surrealism as the exemplar of fantastic art when he of all people should have been aware of the great Victorian tradition.
Two years earlier in 1945, CS Lewis published That Hideous Strength, in which Surrealism (unnamed but very clearly described – some of the works can even be identified) appears as the ultimate in nightmare, nonsense art. Again, there are references to the movement in Charles Williams' last novel, All Hallows' Eve, published just before his death in 1945.
This has as one of its main characters a painter, Jonathon Drayton, whose often surreal works not only reveal the truth behind appearances (itself a major philosophical theme of the Surrealists), but seem to be capable of causing real change not only in the spiritual but also in the material world.
The book was read to the Inklings during its writing, and they were in large part responsible for pushing Williams to convert the failed draft, The Noises that Weren't There, into a readable and publishable novel. Given the importance of the painter and his work in the book, a character which we know thanks to A. M. Hadfield's book on Williams was a major carry-over between the two versions, we have a clear reason why the Inklings might have been discussing the visual arts in the early Forties.
There is a minor mystery about J. R. R. tolkien's addition of statements about art and illustration to the essay On fairy-stories.

The fine 2008 edition of OFS and its manuscripts by Douglas A. Anderson and Verlyn Flieger shows us that the statements about art and illustration were added to the essay when it was published in 1947. No drafts or earlier versions of those statements appear in the Anderson and Flieger edition, though given J. R. R. tolkien's known writing habits, it would be quite extraordinary if there were none. Perhaps they've simply gotten lost in the formidable mass of papers he left.
Whatever the case, it seems clear to me that the statements about art and illustration, like much else in the expanded OFS that was printed, must have arisen from the otherwise unrecorded discussions among the Inklings, which I believe are attested to by their common musing on Surrealism.
Not only was Charles Williams writing a novel in which a painter and his work play an important part during the early 1940's, but he can be expected to have had strong and informed opinions on the matter of visual art.
As well as a writer of both fiction and factual books, he was a playwright for whom the visual aspect of drama was a vital part of the total presentation – remember the importance of drama in J. R. R. tolkien's remarks anent the visual arts in the quotes from OFS which I gave above.
Williams had also, for an uncertain number of years (we really do need a better biography of him!) been part of an esoteric group headed by A. E. Waite. Best known nowadays for the 'Waite' Tarot pack, A. E. Waite saw 'art' in its widest sense – literature, drama, visual images – as a vital part of his occult practice. Williams was remembered as a 'good ritualist' by another member of the group. In context, that indicates that Williams shared that sensitivity to the importance of 'the arts' in action.

The early forties also saw two events which would certainly have been important to J. R. R. Tolkien and very likely C. S. Lewis too.
In 1941 R. G. Collingwood, a man who may well have been on the edges of the Inklings' circle, retired prematurely from a senior post at Oxford University. His ill-health worsened and finally led to his death in 1943.
A philosopher and an archaeologist, Collingwood held positions first at Pembroke College when J. R. R. Tolkien was also there, and then at Magdalen, C. S. Lewis's college. Collingwood certainly knew J. R. R. Tolkien; he is one of only four people thanked by name in Collingwood's introduction to his half of the magisterially disconnected Roman Britain and the English Settlements of 1936. There are other known contacts between J. R. R. Tolkien and Collingwood's circle, too.
Contact between C. S. Lewis and Collingwood is harder to demonstrate, but it seems to me extremely improbable that Lewis – who had after all initially wanted to be a philosophe