Tolkien Etchings

Etching 8×10 inches

This image of Sauron in the top of Barad-dur in the land of Mordor, perhaps as Frodo and Sam saw it when they where on the plane of Gorgoroth, from The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R.Tolkien, is my latest etching. This piece has elements that have been around in sketches going back more than 30 years. The spiral sort of lattice work of the windows, and the cloud-like image of the not yet coalesced Sauron date from the seventies, and the shape of the top of the tower from years later, maybe the eighties? (I’ve been playing around with this stuff for a long time)

I feel that this piece fairly successfully express my image of Barad-dur in that it captures what to me was the most dominant element of Tolkien’s description, its BLACKNESS. The extraordinarily powerful description of it from The Fellowship (which I actually memorized) goes, “…wall upon wall, battlement upon battlement, black, immeasurable strong, mountain of iron, gate of steel, tower of adamant…”. And also it works in that it gives an almost palpable sense of malevolence.