Gandalf Confronting the Balrog on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm — Print & Oil Painting

The format is a letterbox, close to three times as wide as it is tall, and the two ends of it have been given to two different temperatures. The left two thirds is fire: a churning field of gold, amber and white heat with no clear boundary anywhere in it. The right third is cold stone, near black, with a single pale disc of blue-white light set into the wall like a window. Nothing in the middle mediates between them.

The creature is more posture than anatomy. Out of the flame at the left a dark head resolves, lowered and turned in profile, with a heavy ridged brow, a mane of burning fibres and two small green eyes that are the only cool colour on that side of the canvas. Below and ahead of it a foreleg reaches forward onto the rock, and away at the far left two long curved blades are lifted clear of the fire, pale against it, held out at the top of the frame.

Between the two ends run the ribbons. Four or five flat bands of yellow light leave the mass on the left, cross the whole width of the picture in long loose curves, and arrive at the right side already wrapped past the figure standing there, one of them passing behind his shoulder and out again. Whatever they are, they are not approaching. They have arrived, and the composition has been arranged around that fact.

The man is seen from behind and he is tiny. Grey robe, long white hair, both arms up and apart with something thin lifted in the right hand, he stands on the crown of a dark stone arch that curves in from the bottom left and passes under him with nothing beneath it. The pale disc behind him throws his whole silhouette into contre-jour, so we get his outline and no more.

Nobody would have been under that mountain at all except for a metal. The dwarves of these halls mined a silver-grey ore that no other working anywhere had ever produced, light and unrusting and harder than steel, and it made them rich enough that they kept following the seam downward long after they should have stopped. What they eventually reached had been asleep since the world was younger. The wealth and the disaster came out of the same shaft. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, beside a river of lava running through the same halls and the same meeting painted almost entirely in the dark.