Barbara Remington

• 1. Introduction

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  Barbara Remington painted a cover for The Lord of the Rings. J. R. R. Tolkien himself later said it showed what looked like pumpkins in a tree, and a lion that had no business being there. Tolkien had written the books; Remington had painted their most famous American cover art. She was the illustrator behind Ballantine Books' first paperback editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. She also created the companion poster A Map of Middle-earth. How did an artist end up defining the look of Middle-earth for American readers, and what happened once the author saw what she had made?

• 2. Painting Blind

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  Remington's three covers formed a single large painting, divided into three panels, one for each book. In an interview about the project, she said she had not been able to get hold of the books before she began painting them. Friends gave her only a sketchy, secondhand idea of what the story involved, and that sketch was all she had to work from. Whether that guesswork would satisfy the man who had actually written the story was another matter entirely.

• 3. A Convert to Middle-earth

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  Later editions of the cover removed the lions that had confused Tolkien in the first place. Remington later called herself a huge fan of Tolkien's novels, long after the panels were finished. Asked how the covers might have looked if she had read the books first, she said she would have "definitely drawn different pictures." Remington's career did not stop with Middle-earth, and what came next took her well outside Tolkien's world.

• 4. Beyond Middle-earth

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  The combined covers were popular enough to be reissued as a jigsaw puzzle, alongside a large-format edition of the poster. Remington's style also carried into other fantasy work, including cover art for E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros. In 1969 Remington illustrated Scuttle the Stowaway Mouse, written by Jean and Nancy Soule. Her work on the book showed a careful eye for turning characters into her own style, down to the smallest details. She followed it in 1975 with Boat, a wordless story told entirely in pencil and ink. Remington was born in Minnesota on the 23rd of June 1929. She died at her home in Thompson, Pennsylvania, on the 23rd of January 2020, at the age of 90. Her story closed in Pennsylvania, far from the Minnesota where it began.