Mumakil Charging the Rohirrim on the Pelennor Fields — Print & Oil Painting

The beasts are carrying architecture. On the back of each animal stands a timber tower two or three storeys high, with railings, ladders, hanging banners and small figures moving on the platforms, and those towers have been drawn with more structural care than the creatures underneath them. They are siege engines that happen to have legs.

Five of them come across the left half of the canvas at a walk that is already unstoppable, tusks curving outward and bound with rope and blades, trunks swinging, red cloth hanging from the harness. Scale is settled by one detail: the horses fighting around their feet do not reach the top of a knee.

The right half is cavalry painted as a churn. Horses in brown, chestnut and grey, round shields, spear shafts crossing at every angle, one black banner still upright on its pole. Nothing in that mass is legible as an individual and nothing in it was meant to be.

The sky opens at the upper right onto a hot white sun disc pushing rays down through the dust, while the whole left side stays under heavy brown smoke. Every other shape on the canvas is broken or churning, and the eye keeps going back to that disc for relief.

The mûmakil were brought north by the men of Harad, and the riders of Rohan had never seen anything remotely like them before that morning. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same meeting cut down to one rider and one animal.