New book shows off never before seen Middle Earth illustrations by JRR Tolkien

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New book shows off never before seen Middle Earth illustrations by JRR Tolkien

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the publication of The Hobbit, a new book called The Art of The Hobbit shows off the illustrations Tolkien created for the novel, with art that was in the original publication and art that has never been seen publicly before.

“When HarperCollins began preparing for the book’s 75th anniversary next year, the publisher discovered Tolkien had actually created more than 100 illustrations, which lay buried in his archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and were only recently digitised.

The publisher of the book David Brawn had this to say about the book and what it includes…

It includes his conceptual sketches for the cover design, a couple of early versions of the maps and pages where he’s experimenting with the runic forms, as well as a couple of manuscript pages. It shows that Tolkien’s creativity went beyond the writing, that it was a fully thought out conception. When he writes about the hobbit hole [“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort”], he’s designed it as well. And by doing that, it makes his description more vivid … Tolkien was an accomplished amateur artist. He was a great admirer of Arthur Rackham and you can see a little bit of that style coming through.