J. R. R. Tolkien
The Hobbit
Engraved after Gustave Doré
- 42 plates
- Gustave Doré
The book
A comfortable hobbit is bullied out of his door by a wizard and thirteen dwarves, and walks east into country that gets steadily older and less interested in him. Trolls, goblins under a mountain, a riddle game in the dark, elves, a dragon on a hoard, and a battle he sleeps through most of.
Why Gustave Doré
Doré died in 1883; Tolkien published in 1937. They missed each other by half a century, and the loss is real, because Doré is the last illustrator who treated landscape as a character with intentions. His forests are not scenery — they are older than the figures walking through them and slightly hostile to being walked through.
Mirkwood needs exactly that, and every illustrator since has drawn it as trees.
What to look for
Scale by contrast rather than by size: the party is always small and low in the frame, and the thing above them is always doing the work. Doré's habit of putting one shaft of light into an enormous dark interior does more for the goblin caverns than any amount of drawn detail.
