Discover J.R.R. Tolkien’s Personal Book Cover Designs for The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

In some rare cas­es, adap­ta­tions and inter­pre­ta­tions of a lit­er­ary work can sur­pass the source. Despite hun­dreds of valiant efforts on the part of fans, film­mak­ers, game/toy design­ers, and radio pro­duc­ers, this has nev­er been true of the ful­ly-real­ized fan­ta­sy world in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hob­bit and The Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy. (not that it’s ever been anyone’s intent). As we not­ed in a post last week, Tolkien’s fic­tion­al world is so intri­cate, its sources so vast and var­ied, that Corey Olsen, “The Tolkien Pro­fes­sor,” has made it his entire life’s work to open that world up to stu­dents and curi­ous read­ers, most recent­ly with his eight-part lec­ture series on The Hob­bit.

One might also add illus­tra­tors to the list of Tolkien inter­preters above who have—in the almost eighty years since The Hobbit’s pub­li­ca­tion and six­ty years since the first appear­ance of The Lord of the Rings trilogy—done their best to visu­al­ize Tolkien’s world. But per­haps no one did so bet­ter than the mas­ter him­self. Long known as a visu­al artist as well as a lit­er­ary one, Tolkien left behind over 100 illus­tra­tions for The Hob­bit, one of which adorns 2011’s Harper­Collins 75th anniver­sary edi­tion of the book. He also cre­at­ed these orig­i­nal cov­er designs for each book in The Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy.

In the long and com­plex pub­li­ca­tion his­to­ry of Tolkien’s most famous of works, it’s unclear if these designs ever made it onto books pub­lished dur­ing his life­time, but the sig­il in the cen­ter of The Fel­low­ship of the Ring design (left), with its omi­nous eye of Sauron sur­round­ed by elvish runes and topped by the one ring, did grace the ele­gant, min­i­mal­ist cov­ers of the first edi­tion of the tril­o­gy. Tolkien’s art­work received a thor­ough treat­ment in a 1995 mono­graph J.R.R. Tolkien Artist & Illus­tra­tor, which cov­ers over 60 years of Tolkien’s life as an artist, and the mag­ic of flickr brings us this com­pendi­um of Tolkien illus­tra­tions.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Lis­ten to J.R.R. Tolkien Read Poems from The Fel­low­ship of the Ring, in Elvish and Eng­lish (1952)

The Art of the Book Cov­er Explained at TED

Vladimir Nabokov Mar­vels Over Dif­fer­ent “Loli­ta” Book Cov­ers

Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Cov­er for On the Road

Josh Jones is a writer, edi­tor, and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness