Éowyn Advancing Beneath the Fellbeast's Glowing Green Eyes — Print & Oil Painting

The format is doing the work here. On a canvas half as tall as it is wide there is no room for a sky above the fight or a field below it, so the two combatants are pushed out to the edges and the whole middle is filled with one enormous outstretched wing. She occupies the right margin, the beast the left, and the wing is the country between them.

That wing is the best painting in the picture. The membrane is a hot brick red, thin enough to glow, and it has been worked all over with a fine branching network of darker veins so that it reads less like leather than like something lit from behind and full of blood. The bones crossing it are pale and hard, and the trailing edge is ragged with old tears.

The green belongs to the rider, not to the animal. Two hard points of acid green burn inside the crowned helm at the upper left, throwing a sickly halo into the smoke around it, while the beast's own head, lowered along the bottom edge with its jaws parted, has small pale eyes that give off nothing at all. He raises a spiked mace in the left hand; his right arm reaches forward with the fingers open.

Her half of the canvas is warm. She stands in profile facing him with a great deal of loose blonde hair blown back across a sunset that runs from gold to rose, holding a broad sword upright before her face with both hands on the grip, dressed in a green gown under a fitted breastplate and mail sleeves. Behind her the plain is full of tiny armies and the whole right third of the picture is lit like an ordinary evening.

The two halves are painted as though they were two different pictures pushed together, and the seam runs straight down the blade she is holding. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside another meeting of these same three figures and her charge toward the creature's burning perch.