You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to. “ It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. The transition from a peaceful if inexplicable Shire (emus? pink bulbs?) to the hellhole of a blasted Mordor with what look like tissue-paper monsters writhing in front does, at least, convey the point Bilbo made to Frodo about the world they live in: “But to those of us who were weaned on The Lord of the Rings in the early paperback years (this cover was used from the first paperbacks in 1965 until about 1973), we imprinted on this bizarre artwork the way a baby bird will imprint on a plastic doll in the absence of its mother. Worse still, the poster captures neither the grandeur nor the menace that pervade Tolkien’s works.Īnd yet for all their “inaccuracies” Remington’s covers helped create a generation of Tolkien fans: The results reflect this: Remington’s illustrations feature any number of flora and fauna that make no appearance in Tolkien’s work, including a lion on the cover of The Hobbit that the author particularly loathed. She was forced to rely on second-hand input, including the suggestions of the publisher and of friends who had read Tolkien. Thus, it assigned Remington a deadline that left her no time to read the actual novels. It turns out that Ballantine was in a mighty hurry: Competitor Ace was planning to take advantage of a copyright loophole to issue an unauthorized edition of Tolkien, which Ballantine hoped to pre-empt.
But some of the images seem a bit “off”-see for example the benign, amphibian-like critters at bottom center. Surrounding the map is a decorative pictorial border combining the most vivid elements of Remington’s cover illustrations: Hobbiton, Smaug, Shelob the gross-out-spider \, and Mount Doom. The map forms the poster’s central design element, but enlivened by Remington with added color a decorative compass rose and what looks very much like a Viking longship and dashed lines delineating both Bilbo’s and Frodo’s journeys. The poster is a composite of the iconic map of Middle Earth drawn by Tolkien’s third son Christopher (1924-2020) and included in the original English editions of LOTR, with Remington’s own cover designs for Ballantine’s 1965 paperback edition of Tolkien’s work. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (LOTR). The rare first edition of Barbara Remington’s spectacular promotional poster for J.R.R.
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