I was asked to produce fifty watercolors for the single-volume edition. Illustration © Alan Lee for The Folio Society’s edition of J.R.R. The Estate slowly came around to the idea the only request from Christopher Tolkien was that I should concentrate more on the landscapes than the characters, which suited my own preferences. This came with the approaching centenary of the author’s birth.
The UK publisher of this book, Unwin Hyman, also happened to be Tolkien’s publisher, and it was their Tolkien editor, Jane Johnson, who began to look for an opportunity to commission an illustrated edition of The Lord of the Rings. This believable and immersive quality is amplified by the way the names, languages and histories of cultures and characters are deftly threaded into the work, and by the way the themes echo half-remembered stories from our own world. The author’s descriptions of these landscapes are comprehensive and consistent, though unlabored-once conjured, the mountains are kept aloft by the lightest of touches-and some places are so beautifully evoked that they may stay with you for a lifetime. For me though, it was the landscapes of Middle-earth that most captured my interest and lingered long after the quest was fulfilled and the epic concluded.
Seven years after their first publication, the books were becoming a cultural phenomenon the combination of playfulness, poetry and romance and an existential struggle to save the world seemed to align with the spirit of the times, while the characters-now recruited into the counter-culture-lived far beyond the confines of the text. For a few months the Hillingdon suburbs were transformed into the marshes, fells and woodlands of Middle-earth and my friendships were upgraded into fellowships. I first read The Lord of the Rings in 1964, when I was seventeen and working in a cemetery during a hiatus in my art school education.
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