Incredibly, the Tolkien Art Index is now a little over two years old; my last update to it was late last summer, with many new pieces of artwork reproduced in the two new Bodleian Library books accompanying their exhibition, Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth. Today, there’s only one new item — a belated entry (TAI #552) for the Allen & Unwin printed map of Middle-earth from 1954, annotated by Tolkien and Pauline Baynes as background for Baynes’s production of her 1969 poster map, discovered by Blackwell’s in 2015. But more than 120 entries now include publication information for the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s newly-opened Tolkien: Voyage en Terre du Milieu exhibition and its exhibition catalogue Amazon.co.uk link.…
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2018 began with a failure: I was unable to make the deadline for my “Mapping Mordor” chapter in Walking Tree Publishers’ forthcoming book Tolkien and Literary Wordbuilding. The cancer was gone, but I had neither the stamina nor the focus for this project. My editors were very understanding, and I thank them profoundly for their patience and support.…
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The Tolkien Art Index is live! 463 pieces of art by J.R.R. Tolkien are listed — essentially, everything that has been published that is even tangentially related to Middle-earth. At this point, there are titles, descriptions, notes, tags, dates, cross-references — essentially everything except thumbnail versions of the images themselves. These are ready to add, but I must first secure permission to post them, and I have only just now initiated that process — so we’ll need to be patient!…
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The ultimate goal of this index is to list all of the published artwork of J.R.R. Tolkien: drawings, paintings, maps, sketches, doodles — everything, in fact, that might be construed as art other than items consisting purely of Tengwar or Cirth writing. For these, see the excellent Mellonath Daeron Index of Tengwa Specimina (DTS) and Index of Certh Specimina (DCS), respectively. Such an index should ease scholarly discourse and provide an unambiguous shorthand for referring to Tolkien’s artwork.…
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