An Elf Facing the Balrog's Fiery Awakening — Print & Oil Painting

A tree is burning in the middle of this picture and the fire has taken a shape nobody would have predicted. It leaves the ground at the right, climbs the trunk, and then swings out and over the whole crown in a long open loop, like a rope thrown around the top of the tree and pulled tight. Inside that loop the foliage is still green and gold, and outside it the canvas is black.

The thing that threw it is at the right, and it is barely drawn. A dark mass with a suggestion of a horned head and a raised arm stands where the fire is thickest, made of the same blacks and reds as the smoke behind it, and it never quite separates from the background. Refusing to finish the creature is the strongest decision in the image.

Down at the lower left, on a rock shelf below the roots, stands one small pale figure. Silver-white, brightly lit against the dark stone, both arms lifted with a weapon held in them, no larger on the canvas than the smallest branch of the tree above. It is the only cool colour in the picture and the only thing in it with a human proportion.

The sky behind is doing something quietly beautiful. Away to the left, well clear of the fire, it is an ordinary evening: pale gold banked cloud, a soft violet horizon, the last of a sunset. The disaster occupies the right two thirds and the ordinary sky is still there beside it, unaffected, which makes the burning far worse.

The written account of how this creature was woken is much plainer than the image: the dwarves dug too deep in the search for a metal only that mountain had, and they reached something that had been asleep since the first age. There is no tree in that version. This is a designed picture rather than an illustrated scene, and it is better for not pretending otherwise. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same creature painted in full and the diggings that reached it.