Plenty of Nothing

Are the Doors of Durin a Canon Table?

1) Tolkien's illustration of the moonlit Doors of Durin. Source.

2) Canon tables from the Lindisfarne Gospels. Medieval bibles often included canon tables to show where particular stories were to be found in the four Gospels. Conventionally an archway was drawn around the table, and Tolkien the medieval scholar would have been familiar with the design. The canon tables, which combine a gateway motif with directions into the Gospels, may have inspired the form of the Doors of Durin. Source.

But Jason Fisher makes a good case that the Doors of Durin are a parokhet here.

Tapisserie Tolkien

In 2020 la Cité internationale de la tapisserie Aubusson hosted an exhibition of tapestries based on the art of JRR Tolkien. Source.

Jólasveinarnir

Every Christmastime the Yule Lads sneak down, one a day, from the hills, to cause mischief in people's houses, until all thirteen are around, and then they sneak away, one a day, until they're all gone again and the season is over. I wonder if Tolkien had them in mind when he wrote about the dwarves at the beginning of The Hobbit. Source.

Pauline Baynes' Farmer Giles of Ham

There are twenty-five birds and one squirrel on the front cover of Farmer Giles of Ham illustrated by Pauline Baynes.

Speak, Friend, and Enter

The north door of St Edward's Church, Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire, flanked by centuries-old yew trees, is thought to have been Tolkien's inspiration for the Door of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring.

There Is a Shadow

    "There is a shadow, but it is the shadow of the fear of Death, and the shadow of greed. But there is also a shadow of darker evil. We no longer see our king. His displeasure falleth on men, and they go out; they are in the evening, and in the morning they are not. The open is insecure; walls are dangerous. Even by the heart of the house spies may sit. And there are prisons, and chambers underground. There are torments; and there are evil rites. The woods at night, that once were fair -- men would roam and sleep there for delight, when thou wert a babe -- are filled now with horror. Even our gardens are not wholly clean, after the sun has fallen. And now even by day smoke riseth from the temple: flowers and grass are withered where it falleth. The old songs are forgotten or altered; twisted into other meanings."

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lost Road and Other Writings, page 68.

    Tolkien started and abandoned the novel The Lost Road in the mid-1930s. The political situation described above takes place on the island of Numenor in the Second Age, but it's hard not to read into it an awareness on the author's part of events in Europe in the Thirties.

"If I shall sing of thee in antique rhyme"

There's a book to be written about this anthology, by somebody who knows Oxford, English publishing history, and the First World War. These poets came up in the short Georgian period, so there is nature, mythology, and twilight, metred and rhymed. Tolkien is often spoken of as a twentieth-century outsider, but in this book you can see him as a member of a cohort. Sayers went on to become a medieval scholar, and Haldane kicked the phrase Middle Earth around in her career.

The poets are:
Gerald Crow, Eric Dickinson, Esther Lilian Duff, T.W. Earp, Godfrey Elton, H.R. Preston, Russell Green, Naomi M. Haldane, H.C. Harwood, A.L. Huxley, Leslie Phillips Jones, R.S. Lambert, Agnes E. Murray, Robert Nichols, Elizabeth Rendell, L. Rice-Oxley, Dorothy H. Rowe, Dorothy L. Sayers, Eric Earnshaw Smith, G.B. Smith, Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy, E. Graham Sutton, J.R.R. Tolkien, Sherard Vines, H.T. Wade-Gery.

You can read Oxford Poetry 1915 in its entirety here.

Smaug by Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson illustrated the 1961 Swedish edition of The Hobbit. She has taken a lotta stick for not getting  all the details right, but she's done a pretty fine Smaug here. Source.

Sendak's Hobbit

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) did some work on a proposal for a 30th anniversary illustrated edition of The Hobbit, but Tolkien was unimpressed and it didn't happen.

1966 Hobbit Animation

This 1966 Gene Deitch adaptation of The Hobbit owes as much to Rocky and Bullwinkle's Fractured Fairy Tales as to Tolkien. You could think of it as the film of the Ballantine paperback cover illustration -- the one with the emus.