Illustrating Our Imaginations
by Gracie Bialecki
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.
Obviously, when I started seeing posters for a J.R.R. Tolkien exhibit at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, or The BnF, there was no doubt in my mind I would go. Then, when I saw on their website that there would be an interview with Alan Lee, I was amazed at my luck. Seeing his name on the site filled me with the same feeling as learning an old favorite band would be playing in my city.
The BnF holds France’s national archives. The building is huge and built unexpectedly half-underground. There’s a deep sunken courtyard planted with giant Cyprus trees and looking down from the street-level plaza, the space feels mythical, modern, and inaccessible. I’d arrived even earlier than I had for Ian McEwan’s reading last month, and rightly so. After finding the one staircase which descends to the entrance and going through airport-level security, it was easy to tell which auditorium Lee would be speaking in by the crowd gathered outside.
I wondered if they knew him as an illustrator before the books became blockbuster movies. Peter Jackson, who directed, produced, and helped adapt the films, had recruited Lee to be a lead concept artist for Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. During his talk, Lee mentioned that he spent over two years and three thousand drawings working on the films. There was no way of knowing what his work meant to the hundreds of others who filled the seats. All I could do was settle in with my notebook and pen. I’d come prepared.
Lee and his interviewer sat in front of a giant screen. When they started the slideshow of his illustrations, I almost teared up. It was like seeing scenes of the woods and fields where I’d grown up. He spoke about his work with an endearingly self-deprecating British humor, calling “illustration a collaboration” and saying sometimes text goes “beyond what you can do in a picture.”
It wasn’t until the Q&A that a moment of unease silenced the auditorium. “How does it feel,” a woman asked, bordering on accusatory, “to know that millions of people no longer imagine a world because they’ve seen the one you created?” Lee chuckled knowingly and managed to diffuse the tension by admitting this was something he’d thought “quite a bit about.”
He said he preferred, “concentrating on landscapes,” and “taking my experiences of nature and pulling them into the world… I don’t want to be too specific and say this is the way it is.” Lee explained that if he stays true to the text, he hopes his images won’t be far from the one in the reader’s minds.
But if someone had seen the movie before reading the book, how could they imagine anything else? Lee’s world is the definition of Middle Earth for millions of fans. Will future generations grow up with its realms and characters conveniently preconceived? Even I don’t know how my personal vision of Tolkien’s world evolved as I heard his words, poured over the illustrations, and then watched every one of Jackson’s director’s cuts.
After the talk, I explored the exhibit. Earlier its curator had told us there’d been over a million visitors, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that it was hopelessly packed. As I shuffled through, I felt far from everything that was on display. I tried to focus on Tolkien’s early drafts but all I can say about them is he had exquisite penmanship. If I’d had twice the time and there’d been half the people maybe I could’ve engaged with what I was reading enough to start imagining. Maybe if I hadn’t come from seeing Lee’s illustrations, it would’ve been easier to envision my own. As it was, all I wanted were scenes of the Shrine, of Lothlorien, of the plains of Rohan with the Rohirrim galloping across them. Where were the good drawings?
I read what I could before the security guards herded us out to close for the night. Near the end of the exhibit, a recording of Tolkien reading his epigraph played on loop. “Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky. Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone…” I stopped and listened, reciting along in my head, as the words made my heart light and heavy. They filled me with nostalgia for Middle Earth and my fantastical childhood, for my bookish family, and every novel my parents read aloud to me. I wanted to send a message to my family’s group thread, but I hadn’t taken any photos and a text felt entirely inadequate.
Gracie Bialecki is an author, performance poet, and co-founder of New York City's Thirst storytelling series. She lives and writes in Paris, France.
