Elrond with Hadhafang portrait — Print & Oil Painting

He is looking at the sword rather than at us, and the whole portrait is arranged around that downward glance. The blade enters at the lower right, is gripped in one hand at the hilt and steadied by the other high on the left, and runs diagonally across the entire canvas past his face. His eyes follow it. Nothing is being threatened.

The blade repays a close look. It is long, slender and gently curved, single-edged, with a golden fuller running its length, a slim tapering grip and a small red stone set at the pommel. Of everything in the frame it has been given the most finish, and it is held almost level rather than raised.

The costume is layered and carefully described: a salmon-rose outer robe with wide sleeves falling open, a black inner tunic closed to the throat, and a broad band of silver-grey embroidery running down the front in a repeating leaf pattern. A pale circlet crosses the forehead with a single green stone at the centre, and long dark hair falls loose behind the ear, which has been drawn to a fine point.

Behind him the room is split. On the left, a tall screen of silver filigree in cold blue, worked into curling leaf and bird forms and backed with a curtain of deep indigo. On the right, out of focus, a warm orange window burns through a dark tracery. He stands exactly on the line between the cold half and the warm half, and the two lights meet down the middle of his face.

The sword named in the title came out of a film workshop rather than out of the writing. It was designed and christened for the first of the pictures, given an elvish inscription along the blade and a history tying it to an ancestress of his house, and the name is never once spoken aloud on screen. Readers who go looking for it in the text will not find it, which makes this a portrait of a character holding a very handsome invention. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same lord painted with a bow and the battle he has never stopped talking about.