Name: Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth
Uploaded: 2019-01-20T15:24:09.000Z
Duration: 3 min 1 s
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the director of the Morgan Library & Museum.

The Morgan, in collaboration Bodleian Libraries,

University of Oxford, and the Tolkien Trust,

presents "Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth,"

This exhibition celebrates the creative genius

of one of the most renowned and admired authors of the 20th century.

The Morgan exhibition is your only opportunity in America

to see the largest collection ever assembled

of J. R. R. Tolkien's original drawings, manuscripts, and maps.

- For many of us, the name "Tolkien" conjures up visions

of bucolic hillsides and bloody battles--

of little hobbits and beautiful elves and gruesome orcs.

Tolkien had a immensely creative and active mind,

and this of course comes through in the creation of Middle-earth.

Tolkien spent his childhood in the countryside near Birmingham, England,

where he developed a great love of the natural world.

At a very early age, his mother instilled in him

that would have immense impact on his future.

Even before he was out of school, he was already creating

a fictitious language that would eventually develop into Elvish.

While he was in college and even in the trenches of World War I,

he was starting to write down the stories

that would eventually become his legendarium,

Drawings depicting a cloaked and hooded figure

or landscapes of distant, solitary mountains

that he produced in his teenage years were so embedded in his imagination

that 20 years later, it came out in "The Hobbit."

What was to be a sequel-- another of Bilbo's adventures--

quickly developed and became "The Lord of the Rings."

Manuscript drafts and maps in Tolkien's own hand

show how the characters and the narrative developed

while his illustrations, which were never really intended for publication,

show his own visual concepts of the gates of Moria,

and Galadriel's realm, the forest of Lothlórien.

Tolkien's Middle-earth speaks to so many of us

It has geography. It has history. It has languages.

glimpses of a much richer and interwoven narrative.

These rarely seen items in the exhibition

reveal how, for Tolkien, the production of textual and visual material

went hand in hand in the creation of Middle-earth.