J. R. R. Tolkien
The Silmarillion
Engraved after Gustave Doré
- 50 plates
- Gustave Doré
The book
The mythology behind everything else: the making of the world, the theft of three jewels, and five hundred years of an elvish house destroying itself trying to get them back. Told as chronicle rather than novel, in the voice of something being remembered rather than witnessed.
Why Gustave Doré
This book is closer to Milton than to Tolkien's novels, and Doré's Paradise Lost is the greatest illustrated edition of an unillustratable poem ever made. Cosmic scale, figures as silhouette, light as a moral force rather than a physical one — all of it transfers directly.
It is also a text with no protagonist and no continuous scene, which suits an engraver who thought in single sublime images rather than in sequence.
What to look for
Light doing the arguing. The Silmarils, the Trees, the rising of the Sun and Moon — the whole book is about light being made, stolen and lost, and every plate is lit accordingly.
