There was no time to get to Oxford for their big Tolkien exhibition in 2018 and I had too much homework to see it when it came to New York, but where will wants not, a way opens, and I was in Paris for the French version, entitled “A Voyage in Middle-earth”. It was the day after Christmas and despite the transport strike, the exhibition hall at the National Library of France was packed. Someone had to come out before the next person could come in. When I came out the exit, a cheer went up from the group waiting to enter. (It’s nice to be appreciated.) People of all ages were there, including both eager adults dragging recalcitrant teenagers and eager children dragging indulgent adults. I’m afraid I may have held up the line several times by stopping to read the Tengwar or the Old English, but I wasn’t the only one. It was fun to notice that Tolkien made spelling mistakes in Tengwar — the difference between creating a language and “just making stuff up” is that spelling mistakes are impossible in the latter.
Most of the exhibit was works by Tolkien or derivative works by Pauline Baynes, the tapestry-weavers of Aubusson, and plenty of others. (I had the Baynes poster on my bedroom wall, and now it’s in a museum. This is what getting old feels like.) There was a generous helping of Gustave Doré: about 10% of the exhibit. It works surprisingly well. For an example, here’s how Doré portrayed the arrival of Gandalf and Erkenbrand to lift the siege of Helm’s Deep.
Under the rubric “contextualization”, the organizers paired many of JRRT’s works with real-world analogues of things mentioned in his texts. I enjoyed seeing these as much as the directly-connected artifacts. They had a palantir, a credible Arkenstone, and they even made an attempt at the Silmarils. Those last were opals from NZ, Australia, and Mexico, illuminated so they glowed.
The fate of vanquished dragonflies
The exhibit had a bronze-age Greek sword that was the right size and shape for Sting. The Horn of Roland was a pretty good match for Boromir’s horn, especially since it has a big split in it. Elves love Art Nouveau, and the jewelers of Maison Fouquet were obviously in touch with the hero of “Errantry”.
Some items were included with only the most tenuous of connections (Charlemagne’s chess set?) but interesting nevertheless. At least there were oliphaunts involved.
The Death Dealer by Frank Frazetta
The more I think about it, the more I like the way they added the contextual objects. When I first read LotR, in the days when fantasy was strange and hard to find, anyone who wanted to know what unfamiliar objects looked like had to hit the encyclopedia. Therefore we found out exactly what JRRT meant by (e.g.) “battle-axe”. Today the supply of images of fantastic weaponry is unlimited. Everybody knows lots of examples of what a battle-axe looks like thanks to fan art, movies, anime, and video games… but 90% of those are not at all what Tolkien was thinking of. The historical battle-axe blade here was about five inches across rather than the 24-36 inches common in fantasy art. Can you imagine Gimli running from Rauros to Fangorn carrying one of those monsters?
Wings are much more practical than horns.
One item particularly pleasing to this Idiosopher was a winged helmet such as they wore in Gondor. I got some pushback for saying Gondor was like ancient Egypt (lots of people want it to be Byzantine Constantinople), but the Wise Clerks of Paris assure us Minas Tirith’s soldiers were wearing hats from the 4th Century BCE.
Altogether a delightful way to spend a rainy December afternoon. My thanks to all the people who made it happen.
Coda
French Tolkien-nerds are better dressed than their US counterparts, but just as maladroit. We didn’t go three minutes without somebody triggering one of the infrared sensors that beep when you get to close to an artifact (only one was me). An informal scan suggests that less than a quarter of those incidents involved the artifact the person was actually looking at.
Leave a Reply