Middle Earth: The World of Tolkien Illustrated (Art by David Wenzel, with text by Lin Carter) 1977

Wow. 1977. The very same year of my own Tolkien flowering (the seed had already been planted in 1973). I wonder if I may even have seen it advertised in the same places I saw The Land of Froud (also 1977), but put it from my mind because we were not a mail-ordering family just yet (certainly not to risk the princely sum of $6.95 plus shipping and handling), or because it didn’t look like it could match the Hildebrandt calendar that year, or even because I was not then so confirmed a fanatic.

To put some things in perspective, it came out forty years after The Hobbit’s first printing (in comparison, it has now been approximately 45 years since this art album was released), four years after Tolkien’s death, and twelve years before David Wenzel went on to publish (along with Chuck Dixon and Sean Deming) his graphic novel adaptation. The text by Lin Carter consists of a preface talking about Tolkien’s literary importance and then a paragraph explaining the action in each picture.  At that time, David Wenzel had been mainly a comic book artist (penciller) for such Marvel productions as The Savage Sword of Conan and The Avengers; later he illustrated the 1980 book Kingdom of the Dwarfs by Robb Walsh (see elsewhere in this blog), for which his Middle-earth work had well-prepared him.  

Although the term Middle-earth looms large in the title and might lead one to expect a broader range of subjects, including scenes from The Lord of the Rings, the drawings are confined to the story of The Hobbit, illustrating the tale more or less in order. Due to the size of several double-page pictures and printing constraints, that order is not always maintained. The pictures tend to alternate evenly between black-and-white and colored, until near the very end. But such things need only concern the very obsessively compulsive.

Wenzel’s art is very engaging, and tends to emphasize the humorous, childlike nature of The Hobbit rather than the ‘epic fantasy’ aspect so many want to read back into it once they have discovered The Lord of the Rings. An example of this would be his depiction of Smaug, still menacing, but on an elephantine and not dinosaur-like scale. One can easily see the comic book roots in such things as Bilbo’s stance and attitudes, and even without the publishing history it would be possible to date it smack-dab in the Seventies, I think. Wenzel’s later complete graphic novel adaptation shows how he evolved into a more natural and painterly approach without losing his personal style.

Even though I ‘discovered’ this volume only a few short years ago, I still wonder why I waited so long to get it. Of course, part of the answer was my comparative poverty and its comparative expense – both of which have been somewhat ameliorated. With Amazon’s The Rings of Power looming on the horizon, I am glad to have today finally got this reminder of a simpler time and of at least the related, alternative milieu of my own Tolkien past.