J.R.R. Tolkien is the beloved author behind The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, two of the most influential fantasy books of the past 100 years. While he’s obviously most lauded for his writing, Tolkien was also an amateur artist who created work to go along with his stories, although not much has seen the light of day.
That was until a series of Tolkien exhibitions held before the pandemic shut down any kind of public viewing put some of that art on display, and people were taken by it. Now, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is putting out a new edition of The Lord of the Rings that incorporates some of the author’s artwork, which seems like as good an excuse as any to revisit this classic story. Check out the cover below:
Some very apt news for #TolkienReadingDay: For the first time ever, The Lord of the Rings is being published in an author-illustrated edition, featuring colour pictures, maps and sketches by J.R.R. Tolkien himself. Arriving 14 October. Pre-order here: https://t.co/yicPfVGFUT pic.twitter.com/7CSnoE5Yro
— Waterstones (@Waterstones) March 25, 2021
“His charming and evocative illustrations that accompanied The Hobbit, particularly the now-iconic image that appears on its cover, have become as beloved as the story they accompany,” Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publisher Deb Brody said in a statement. “Yet the author himself was characteristically modest, dismissive of the obvious and rare artistic talent he possessed despite having had no formal training. This modesty meant that relatively little else of his artwork was known of or seen during his lifetime, and generally only in scholarly books afterwards.”
"[T]his all changed in 2018, with the first of three record-breaking Tolkien exhibitions in Oxford, New York and Paris, at which hundreds of thousands of people were able to appreciate at first hand the extraordinary artistic achievement of a man known primarily for the written word. Among the exhibits was a selection of the paintings, drawings and sketches that Tolkien produced when writing The Lord of the Rings. Originally intended by him purely for his personal pleasure and reference, after such an overwhelmingly positive response by people to Tolkien the Artist it seemed fitting to finally reunite this art with the words it enhances, and we are delighted that in so doing it will allow people to enjoy this masterpiece anew."
I do like the evocative simplicity of that cover. All the famous elements from the story are there — the eye, the Ring, the Elvish script — but they’re arranged in an almost abstract way that feels very modern.
The new Lord of the Rings edition will come out on October 19, 2021 before getting translated and spread around the world.
The Lord of the Rings movies return to theaters
The Lord of the Rings is going through a boom time right now, what with new illustrated editions and Amazon spending gazillions of dollars on an upcoming TV show about Second Age of Middle-earth. And The Hollywood Reporter has it that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies are going to be screened in Chinese cinemas, with The Fellowship of the Ring landing on April 4, The Two Towers on April 16 and The Return of the King on April 23.
This comes right after a successful rerelease of James Cameron’s Avatar into Chinese cinemas, where it picked up an extra $50 million at the box office with no marketing. The last time The Lord of the Rings movies were in Chinese theaters, the cinematic infrastructure was far less developed, so they may actually earn more money this time than last.
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