The Carved Bridge Leading to Thranduil's Halls — Print & Oil Painting

The carving is the reason to stop here. A single stone arch crosses the whole foreground, and every surface of it that faces the viewer has been worked into interlace: broad flat ribbons that cross over and under each other in continuous knots, running along the parapet, filling the spandrels, and wrapping the piers at both ends. No section repeats exactly. The stone is honey-coloured and the cut lines hold a darker shadow, so the pattern reads clearly even at a distance.

Behind the bridge the rock face is doing something similar in a different register. Slender ribbed columns rise out of the cliff on both sides and open at the top into branching capitals, half architecture and half tree, and they are cut from the same living rock they stand against rather than set into it. The right side carries a whole gallery of them in silhouette against the light.

Water falls everywhere and it is the only white on the canvas. Three separate falls drop behind the bridge, one directly through the middle of the arch, and a fourth spills off a ledge at the right into mist. The paint there is thin, dragged downward, and left slightly transparent, so the rock reads through the water in places.

The lighting is arranged in two temperatures. A broad warm glare comes in from the upper right, hazing the columns and bleaching the top of the cliff; a small orange lamp burns on a bracket at the far left, close to the viewer, and it is the only artificial light in the picture. Between them the middle stays in cool green shadow.

The gate this bridge serves is described plainly in the book: a river crossed by a bridge, great stone doors that swing shut and are opened by no ordinary means, and a hall of pillars cut from the rock behind them. The later writings are also frank that the whole place was a lesser copy of a greater hall from an older age, built without the wealth, the craft or the dwarvish help that the original had. A bridge carved this obsessively is the work of a house with something to prove. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same halls seen from inside and the king of those halls on his antlered seat.