3 Drawings Based on Tolkien’s Short Stories

A friend asked me whether I could illustrate some of Tolkien’s short stories. What I read was so beautiful that I spent more and more time on each of the 3 drawings I produced. Didn’t want to get out of his universe :) I don’t know how Tolkien mastered such craft: overwhelming his reader with emotions and poetry in stories that can be read in less than an hour and a half.

Leaf, By Niggle

Niggle’s got a journey he has to undertake. But he doesn’t want to. So he postpones it. Meanwhile, he paints. He paints, and sometimes he doesn’t. Oh! such a moving and human story.

“He went on looking at the Tree. All the leaves he had ever laboured at were there, as he had imagined them rather than as he had made them; and there were others that had only budded in his mind, and many that might gave budded, if only he had had time.

Roverandom

Rover’s a nice puppy but one day he bites a wizard’s trousers. Which you should never do. The wizard punishes him by reducing his size to the one of a toy! The places he’ll go, the creatures he’ll meet, the travels he’ll make to recover from his fate make this story a wonderful fairy tale.

Roverandom: “When he opened [his eyes] again the moon was laid out below them, a new white world shining like snow, with wide open spaces of pale blue and green where the tall pointed mountains threw their long shadows far across the floor. On top of one of the tallest of these, one so tall that it seemed to stab up towards them as Mew swept down, Rover could see a white tower.”

Smith of Wotton Major

Why is this one so poetic? Its beginning is puzzling, its construction not so obvious, and yet I dived so deeply in the universe. Magical cakes, fay-Stars, children, village, forest — a human life crosses an enchanted world.

Smith of Wotton Major: “He had business of its own kind in Faery, and he was welcome there; for the star shone bright on his brow, and he was safe as a mortal can be in that perilous country.”

All of these stories can be found in the collection Tales From The Perilous Realm, published in 1997 by Harper Collins. You can start reading it for free on Glose.

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