The Fellowship Gazing Up at Caras Galadhon — Print & Oil Painting

The picture is upright and the trunk fills it from the bottom of the frame to the top with no sky admitted anywhere. Around that trunk a stair climbs in a single long spiral, its outer rail picked out in thin gold, and above the stair the structure opens into a crown of tall pale spikes arranged in a ring like the points of a coronet. Two more crowns of the same kind are visible higher up and further back.

Everything is blue. Bark, roots, foliage, air and stone are all versions of the same deep midnight, and the only exceptions are the lights: a few dozen small white and gold points scattered across the whole surface, some hanging in the branches, some set into the balustrades, two of them carried up the stair by figures in pale robes.

The base of the tree is where the drawing is best. Roots as thick as barrels flow outward and downward, and between them a broad pale platform has been laid with shallow steps leading up to it, so that the natural and the built meet without either giving way. A warm fire-coloured glow comes from behind the roots at the centre and is the only warm light in the picture.

On those steps stand the visitors. Four or five small hooded figures are grouped at the bottom centre with their backs to us and their heads tipped back, one taller shape stands a little apart at the left, and another waits at the foot of the stair. Together they occupy perhaps a fortieth of the height of what they are looking at.

The name of the place means the city of the trees, and it had no fortification worth the word: a green mound with a deep ditch and a bank thrown up around it, one gate on the south side, and after that only trees and a great many lamps hung in the branches, silver and gold and green. It was defended by being difficult to want to attack. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same stair with the company coming down it and a lit pavilion in the same wood at night.