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Location
Weatherford, Oklahoma
Document Type
Paper
Event Website
https://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-54.htm
Start Date
26-7-2026 10:00 AM
End Date
26-7-2026 10:50 AM
Description
In The Fellowship of the Ring, when the travelers step in Lothlórien, their perceptions of their surroundings and of time are altered. Numerous papers have considered the literary devices used by J.R.R. Tolkien to convey the sense of otherness that makes this Elven realm an equivalent to Faerie in Middle-earth. In their turn, how do visual artists tasked with illustrating The Lord of the Rings transpose these effects in their pictures? In this paper I continue my research into Tolkienian illustrations by analyzing the visual devices used by Mary Fairburn, Alan Lee, and the duo formed by the Queen of Denmark and Eric Fraser—four artists either in contact with J.R.R. Tolkien or whose illustrations feature in illustrated editions of The Lord of the Rings—to represent the closed space that is Lothlórien in the chapter “The Mirror of Galadriel”. By analyzing iconography, points of view, colors and composition, I argue that some of these artists wielding color make similar choices of composition and iconography while the ones working in black and white tend to turn to a higher level of symbolism, but all of them find a way to echo the way J.R.R. Tolkien writes Lothlórien as a closed space, separate from the rest of Middle-earth.
Creative Commons License
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Included in
Illustrating Lothlórien as a Faerie Space in The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Weatherford, Oklahoma
In The Fellowship of the Ring, when the travelers step in Lothlórien, their perceptions of their surroundings and of time are altered. Numerous papers have considered the literary devices used by J.R.R. Tolkien to convey the sense of otherness that makes this Elven realm an equivalent to Faerie in Middle-earth. In their turn, how do visual artists tasked with illustrating The Lord of the Rings transpose these effects in their pictures? In this paper I continue my research into Tolkienian illustrations by analyzing the visual devices used by Mary Fairburn, Alan Lee, and the duo formed by the Queen of Denmark and Eric Fraser—four artists either in contact with J.R.R. Tolkien or whose illustrations feature in illustrated editions of The Lord of the Rings—to represent the closed space that is Lothlórien in the chapter “The Mirror of Galadriel”. By analyzing iconography, points of view, colors and composition, I argue that some of these artists wielding color make similar choices of composition and iconography while the ones working in black and white tend to turn to a higher level of symbolism, but all of them find a way to echo the way J.R.R. Tolkien writes Lothlórien as a closed space, separate from the rest of Middle-earth.
https://dc.swosu.edu/mythcon/mc54/schedule/24
