Oxonmoot 2024

Depictions of Beasties in the Tolkien Landscape. Lots of pretty pictures and some griping about AI.

2022 has brought new depictions of an area of Middle-earth that had not been the focus of adaptations so far—Númenor. Amazon Prime’s Rings of Power took its spectators to a reimagined Second Age much indebted visually to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movie trilogies, while Alan Lee continued his exploration of Arda with accompanying illustrations to The Fall of Númenor edited by Brian Sibley. The two entirely different and unrelated projects brought this pseudo-Atlantis to the foreground, and steeped its iconography in Antiquity, with surprisingly similar sources of inspiration for surprisingly dissimilar results. In this paper I offer to compare and contrast those depictions, shedding light on the way artists read the Akallabêth and how they interpret it.

John Howe's Illustrations of the Three Ages of Middle-earth.

A Powerpoint presentation on with specific reference to (but far wider-ranging than) Brian Sibley's collaborations with John Howe on the newly revised and re-illustrated edition of 'J.R.R.Tolkien - The Maps of Middle-earth' (published by HarperCollins, April 2024) and 'The Tolkien Calendar 2025' (containing an essay on Howe's cover illustrations for volumes of Christopher Tolkien's 'The History of Middle-earth'), published July 2024.

Brian's talk will be relayed into the second lecture theatre when space in the MOLT runs out