John Howe, illustrator of Tolkien’s works: ‘The most difficult are the elves; they should give the impression of being beyond all beauty’

If there’s anything more extraordinary than traversing Middle-earth from one end to the other, with its wonders and dangers, it’s doing it by drawing. That’s what Canadian artist John Howe has done, following in the footsteps of Bilbo, Frodo, and other characters from J. R. R. Tolkien’s works from Bag End, the two hobbits’ home in the Shire, to Mordor, Sauron’s dark realm, visiting along the way places as famous (and some as ominous) to Tolkien fans as Rivendell, Isengard, Khazad-dûm, Minas Tirith, Edoras, and Helm’s Deep.

Howe has collected his impressions and drawings in the fabulous A Middle-earth Traveller: Sketches from Bag End to Mordor (2017), a work as important as the Red Book of Westmarch or the Book of Mazarbul, which the dwarf Gimli carried. The illustrator has not only traveled with his imagination to do so but has also been to some real locations in Tolkien’s geography: the New Zealand settings where The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit were filmed in 1998 and 2009 respectively, Peter Jackson’s adaptations on which Howe worked as an artistic designer alongside Alan Lee, capturing the entire Tolkien universe, from the dwarves’ pipes to the colossal Argonath, the Pillars of the Kings, the elves’ bows and arrows, or Bilbo’s larder.

Howe, one of the greatest visual specialists in Tolkien’s work and to whose pencil we owe images on calendars, posters, and the covers and illustrations of books by the author of The Lord of the Rings (he is one of the illustrators of the Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth), was one of the guest stars of the Barcelona International Comic Fair, which closed on April, during these spring days when the white tree of Gondor seems to be blooming everywhere. When you see Howe, it seems that he has really come from a faraway place. You could even mistake him for one of the Rangers of the North that Aragorn led under the name of Strider. When you mention this to him and praise his wiry, serious, and resolute appearance, which would terrify a goblin or an orc, even a premium Uruk-hai (Howe practices medieval fencing with a Swiss historical reenactment group), he cracks a smile and says you should have seen him a few years earlier when he had more and longer hair.

Getting back to the point, and since we’re the same age, I ask him if he remembers the huge impression The Lord of the Rings made on our generation. “Well, I had a pretty catastrophic reading,” he explains. “I was 12, couldn’t afford to buy the books, and had to borrow them from the public library, where the first volume was never available. So I had to start with the second, The Two Towers, and then read the third, The Return of the King. It was a messy, chaotic read. Read like that, the story didn’t make much sense.” When he finally got around to reading the entire trilogy in order, “it had an impact on me, even though I was very young and at the time I was mostly interested in the battles and such things; later, I understood the true scope of the work.”

Which Tolkien characters are the most difficult to draw? “I couldn’t say; they all have their difficulties, some are more complex, certainly, and since the films, some have become inseparable from the actors who played them. Perhaps the most difficult are the elves. Because we have no personal experience with immortal beings. And Tolkien’s description of them isn’t very precise either.”

Several elves are drawn in A Middle-earth Traveller, including Thranduil, the king of the Woodland Realm, father of the popular and pinpoint archer Legolas. In one drawing, Howe impressively depicts him in ornate armor and mask, armed with an elven halberd during the Battle of the Five Armies. In general, Howe’s elves are hauntingly beautiful, with a rare ethereal, wild, and intimidating ferocity. “When drawing them, you have to try to avoid modern faces,” he notes. “And they should give the impression of being beyond all beauty.”

The subject of elves leads Howe to reflect on Tolkien’s enormous creative capacity. “In the 1920s, before The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were published, if you asked anyone what an elf was, they would tell you they were a small fairy creature who lived in a corner of the garden. Tolkien revised that image and turned them into the very different, tall, impressive, and dangerous beings we imagine them to be today. It’s extraordinary that a single person could have turned an image so deeply rooted for centuries on its head. In any case, it’s difficult to unravel exactly what Tolkien had in mind. Are they creatures from Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian mythology, Miltonic angels exiled from paradise, a mixture of everything, or something else?”

Does Howe reread Tolkien’s works to better understand his world? “That’s what I spend most of my time doing, trying to understand Tolkien and the sources of inspiration for his world. There’s a very interesting book, Switzerland in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, by Martin Monsch [the prologue is by Howe himself], which explains how a trek through the Bernese Alps aged 19, in the summer of 1911, inspired in Tolkien — as he himself said — the great mountain landscapes of his literary universe.”

According to the book, the Lauterbrunnen Valley, with its precipices, inspired Rivendell, and the Jungfrau and Silberhorn groups inspired the Misty Mountains, the great mountain range of Middle-earth. “It’s actually not enough to simply place the Alps in Middle-earth; Tolkien’s imagination didn’t work that way. It’s about understanding what he felt and how he translated that emotion into his work.”

In A Middle-earth Traveller — which features scenes that will be very familiar to those who have seen Jackson’s films, because they were made specifically for them — Howe includes many landscapes, some truly breathtaking. The Lonely Mountain (Erebor in the Elvish Sindarin language), where Smaug lived, rises precisely like the alpine ridge of the Matterthorn; the Misty Mountains reveal their dangerous snowy passes; atop the peak of Celebdil, reminiscent of the Jungfrau, we see Gandalf finally confront the Balrog after having fallen into the depths of Moria; and Mount Doom, in the black heart of Mordor, belching smoke, seems to await Frodo and his burden, the One Ring.

Does Howe prefer drawing landscapes or characters? “I’m fascinated by establishing a personal relationship with the landscape and, beyond that, with the sublime, and I have wanted to explore by even drawing territories that Tolkien only mentions in passing or briefly. On the other hand, I love to draw monuments, cities, ruins, and characters and also everyday objects, crafts and weapons, axes, swords; materializing even the smallest elements of Tolkien’s world has been a challenge and a privilege.”

Is Sauron very complicated to draw? “I mean, it’s a challenge, of course; there’s a long history behind him that must be carefully observed. But he’s not Tolkien’s most complex character. His difficulty is that he’s very changeable; it’s essential to take his evolution into account. In The Lord of the Rings, the basic element is that we can’t actually see him, although in Jackson’s film, we have a vision during the initial battle in which he loses the Ring. In my book, there’s actually a sketch of Sauron breaking Elendil’s famous sword, Narsil. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series has allowed us to see him as he was before, in his human form and in his disguises.”

In Howe’s book, there are both good and evil characters: the Dark Lord Melkor and the giant spider Ungoliant, her daughter Shelob, dragons such as Glaurung, Ancalagon the Black, and Smaug, orcs, goblins from Moria, barrow-wights, dire wolves, the Nazgûl, and even a Variag from the remote Khand reminiscent of Darth Maul in the Star Wars films; and on the other side, eagles, Tom Bombadil, ents, elves, the Rohirrim... Which does Howe prefer to draw? “They’re all interesting. Tolkien shouldn’t be reduced to good versus evil, to a confrontation between good and bad; Tolkien is much more than that.”

There aren’t many female characters in A Middle-earth Traveller, although there is a drawing of Éowyn armed as a Rider of Rohan, wearing a Sutton Hoo-style helmet with a crest, scale breastplate, and short sword, alongside the faceless-helmed Witch-king of Angmar, who she killed at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. Was Tolkien a misogynist? “He was clearly old-fashioned, very discreet, and he was English. But I don’t think he was a misogynist; he was a man of his time, in which women didn’t have roles as active as they do in the 21st century. We don’t have to project modern ideas onto Tolkien. However, in his letters, we don’t see any misogyny. And he tried not to leave women out of his work. In fact, we have some very interesting female characters: Galadriel, Arwen, Éowyn. My favorite is one who doesn’t actually appear: the mother of Boromir and Faramir [Finduilas of Dol Amroth], wife of the deranged ruling steward of Gondor, Denethor II. She left behind a dysfunctional family, and I would have liked to know more about her.”

Do Tolkien fans bother the artist a lot? Some can be very picky. “No, I don’t have any problems with them, but I’m very aware of their passion, their sense of ownership, and I understand them. I feel privileged to be part of that world. It’s true that sometimes I have to remind them that we’re on the same side. Mutual respect is crucial. Occasionally, they tell me that something isn’t how I interpreted it, and then I ask them: ‘So how should it be?’ And they don’t know how to answer. When I see that they are very worried, I reassure them by telling them that many images that may shock them won’t last if they don’t connect with the audience, that they shouldn’t worry. There’s natural selection, and what doesn’t work disappears. On the other hand, there are representations like that of the Balrog, on which everyone agrees. It’s been a kind of collective creation; they all look the same. I’m fascinated by the ability of some images to penetrate, solidify, and endure in the collective imagination as a shared culture. It’s sensational, especially because they deal with things that don’t exist.”

On working with Jackson, Howe says it was a “very stimulating and enriching relationship, with a lot of dialogue,” and emphasizes: “For an artist, he’s the best.” Was drawing or film better for Tolkien? “Film is very effective; it transports you very easily and communicates a lot, but I couldn’t say which is better for Tolkien’s work; illustration provides a different kind of interaction.”

Regarding the fact that Tolkien himself illustrated his works, Howe says he doesn’t believe it conditions or limits him. “Nothing limits me as a draftsman, nor does it curtail my imagination. Tolkien’s drawings can be exciting, intriguing, informative, but also not necessarily inspiring. What’s interesting and significant is that, magnificent master of words that he was, he felt the need at times to illustrate his works. I love that feeling.”

Howe hasn’t limited himself to Tolkien’s works. HarperCollins published an anthology of his drawings, Myth & Magic: The Art of John Howe, with a foreword by Jackson, an afterword by Alan Lee, and texts by Ian McKellen and writers such as Robert Holdstock, the author of Mythago Wood. He has published a generic book on dragons, another on lost worlds, and has also illustrated The Great Book of King Arthur by John Matthews, with full-color plates and very suggestive pencil drawings.

“I am attracted to the Arthurian world by the proximity of the fantastic in a real, mundane universe; the intrusion of wonder and symbolism, seeing how it tries to revoke the realm of the possible.” One of his drawings shows the final scene of the sword being thrown into the lake. Does he remember John Boorman’s Excalibur? “Of course! It was a shock to see that film. You say Boorman was a Jungian? I’m not surprised at all.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition