Rivendell's Spire Rising Through Golden Waterfall Mist — Print & Oil Painting

The top edge of this panorama is a continuous rim of waterfalls. Counting is difficult and the number is somewhere past a dozen: they come over the lip of the encircling cliff at intervals along its entire length, some broad, some no thicker than a thread, several breaking into mist before they reach the bottom, and together they form a horizontal band of white that runs from the left edge to the right without a gap.

Under that, the water has trouble leaving. The floor of the gorge is choked with pale boulders the size of houses, and the river works its way between them in a series of turquoise pools and short falls, doubling back, spreading, and dropping again. It is the only passage in the picture that looks difficult, and it takes up the whole foreground.

The settlement sits on a terraced shelf in the middle distance and is nearly lost. Pale walls, arcades and stairways step down the rock in four or five levels, and above them rise a handful of pointed roofs and one slim spire, all of them finished in a warm gold that is the only manufactured colour anywhere on the canvas. Everything else is stone, water, moss and dark pine.

A soft flare enters at the upper left and throws the whole left third into a warm haze, catching the falls and the mist coming off them, while the right side stays cooler and greener. Dark foliage closes the top left and bottom right corners. The proportion is a long letterbox, and the eye is walked across the falls rather than into the buildings.

Somebody lived in those buildings for sixteen years doing nothing but writing. An old hobbit came back here after his adventure, settled in with the household, worked on his book and translated a great deal of elvish out of sources nobody else was reading, and handed the results to his nephew in a bundle when the time came. Most of what is known about the elder days in this story arrives that way, from a spare room above a waterfall. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same halls seen from the bridge and lamps burning behind one of these falls.