Éowyn Charging Toward the Blazing Perch of the Fellbeast — Print & Oil Painting

One red cloak carries the whole canvas. Everything else in the picture, sky, ground, wings, walls and smoke, has been pushed into a cold teal and slate green, and in the middle of that a single figure runs forward with a crimson cloak streaming out behind her. It is the only saturated colour in the image and the eye cannot leave it alone.

She is moving, and the drawing says so: weight forward, blonde hair loose, one arm extended with a sword out ahead and the other back for balance, both feet off the line of the slope. She is charging downhill at something perhaps five times her height.

The creature meets her with both wings fully spread, one to each edge of the frame, and they are drawn as a pair of ribbed black sails that take up a third of the whole canvas. It is crouched on a mound of dark rubble with its neck lowered, jaws open, and on its back sits an armoured shape with a horned outline, half absorbed into the body beneath it.

Behind them the field is doing several things at once: a bolt of acid green lightning drops behind the beast, burning projectiles arc down from the upper left trailing orange, broken spears and standards stick up out of the ground, and the pale towers of a besieged city stand in the mist at the right. The measured brightness of the whole piece is very low, which is why the fires read as far away rather than as illumination.

In the book the animal is dealt with first. She takes the beast's head off before its rider ever touches the ground, and only then does the fight that everyone remembers begin. A painting aimed at the beast rather than at the crown is therefore the more accurate of the two possible pictures. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the moment she plants herself over the fallen king and the same creature painted alone in flight.