John Howe, illustrator of Tolkien’s works

If there’s anything more extraordinary than traversing Middle-earth from one end to the other, with its wonders and dangers, it’s doing it by drawing. That’s what Canadian artist John Howe has done, following in the footsteps of Bilbo, Frodo, and other characters from J. R. R. Tolkien’s works from Bag End, the two hobbits’ home in the Shire, to Mordor, Sauron’s dark realm, visiting along the way places as famous (and some as ominous) to Tolkien fans as Rivendell, Isengard, Khazad-dûm, Minas Tirith, Edoras, and Helm’s Deep.

Howe has collected his impressions and drawings in the fabulous A Middle-earth Traveller: Sketches from Bag End to Mordor (2017), a work as important as the Red Book of Westmarch or the Book of Mazarbul, which the dwarf Gimli carried. The illustrator has not only traveled with his imagination to do so but has also been to some real locations in Tolkien’s geography: the New Zealand settings where The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit were filmed in 1998 and 2009 respectively, Peter Jackson’s adaptations on which Howe worked as an artistic designer alongside Alan Lee, capturing the entire Tolkien universe, from the dwarves’ pipes to the colossal Argonath, the Pillars of the Kings, the elves’ bows and arrows, or Bilbo’s larder.

Howe, one of the greatest visual specialists in Tolkien’s work and to whose pencil we owe images on calendars, posters, and the covers and illustrations of books by the author of The Lord of the Rings (he is one of the illustrators of the Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth), was one of the guest stars of the Barcelona International Comic Fair, which closed on April, during these spring days when the white tree of Gondor seems to be blooming everywhere. When you see Howe, it seems that he has really come from a faraway place. You could even mistake him for one of the Rangers of the North that Aragorn led under the name of Strider. When you mention this to him and praise his wiry, serious, and resolute appearance, which would terrify a goblin or an orc, even a premium Uruk-hai (Howe practices medieval fencing with a Swiss historical reenactment group), he cracks a smile and says you should have seen him a few years earlier when he had more and longer hair.