Nazgûl Gathering Among the Ruins of Weathertop at Night — Print & Oil Painting

Everything in this painting is drawn with light instead of line. Five hooded figures stand in a loose group in the middle of the frame, and each one has been described only by a thin pale blue rim running down the outer edge of the hood, the shoulder and the fall of the robe. The interiors are left as unbroken dark. Turn the light off and there is nothing on the canvas at all.

They are standing rather than advancing, and that is the difference between this picture and every other version of the subject. Two hold swords upright at rest, one has a blade across the body, none is moving, and the group has arranged itself in the loose semicircle of people waiting for something. Mist lies around their feet and hides the ground.

Behind them the ruins are barely there: a broken arch, the stump of a wall, a doorway with nothing behind it, all in the same blue-black and all softened until they read as weather rather than as masonry. At the left a cold blue glow leaks in from off-frame and gives the whole scene its only light source.

The measured saturation is surprisingly high for a canvas this dark, and the reason is that the darks are not neutral: they are a deep saturated blue right through, so the picture is intensely coloured and almost black at the same time.

The hill they are standing on was a fortress, and its ruin is much older than they are. It carried the great watchtower of the northern kingdom, it held one of the seeing-stones, and it was burned and thrown down in the wars against the witch-realm of the north, whose lord is now the tallest of the figures in this painting. He is standing in a building he destroyed. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same five painted in green and moving and the hill in daylight with a pony grazing under it.