Inktober 2016 - Tolkien Series

Hear you now: a story of good against evil - an epic that has its beginning at an ending, and ends at a beginning. Listen as we speak of the fall of a lord of darkness, and the return of a king of light. Concern yourself with armies and wizards, phantoms and emperors, cloud-capped towers and bloodied fields of horrendous carnage. Consider no less the cataclysmic transformation of that anient world of wonder and magic to the world we know now - of man. What mighty lord, you may ask, is hero enough to evoke such cosmic metamorphosis? Why, no lord at all, but the littlest of fellows: Frodo the hobbit, and his faithful squire Samwise, who, beginning at the ending, now approach Rivendell, the elvish home of Elrond - there to celebrate the 129th birthday of Frodo's aged kin: Bilbo Baggins, renowned tormentor of dragons.

The 1977 Rankin-Bass animated film adaptation of The Hobbit is a treasure and I refuse to hear otherwise lest my entire childhood collapse beneath me.

In 2016, trying to hold at bay the ever-encroaching atrophy of my drawing muscles, I did an Inktober series of characters from the movie and from Rankin-Bass' later adaptation of The Return of the King - which I love with equal childish ardor - in grayscale marker. (Aragorn, Frodo, and the Witch-King are from the latter film.) Each piece took a shockingly, distressingly long time, evidencing my eternal failure to practice drawing regularly, but the result of the markers in a style already so close to my heart continues to this day to delight me.

I posted each piece on social media in succession, daily, as I finished them, accompanied by consecutive snippets of the above narration from the opening of the Return of the King. (For the record, I think we can blame the writers of the two movies, in no small part, for the development of my love of big, esoteric - even cinematic - words, and archaic-flavored grammar-play. Please address all complaints to them.) I will admit to bailing out of the rest of Inktober after I finished this mini-series, but it was immensely gratifying to make a final post of all the images collaged together with the full text of the narration, and equally so to see them all together again here.