Dwarves Overlooking the Ruins of Erebor's City — Print & Oil Painting

There are two subjects in this picture and the near one is looking at the far one. Along the left foreground, on a bare rock shelf, six or seven figures stand in near silhouette with their backs to us: hooded, thickset, bearded where the profile shows it, one leaning on a shaft, one lower down with a fair braided head. We are watching people watch something.

What they are looking at gets all the detail. A stone city stands ruined on a spur across the gap, packed tight with towers and stepped terraces, its walls broken open in a dozen places and its highest tower snapped off short. Streets and arches are still legible in it, which is what makes the wreck read as a place people lived rather than as rubble.

A single cold cast lies over the entire image. Everything, rock, snow, cloth, ice and sky, has been pushed toward the same green-blue, and the only variation allowed is in value. It gives the picture the look of a photograph taken through cold glass and drains any warmth out of the reunion the figures are presumably having.

The right third is taken up by the mountain itself, an enormous mass of blue ice and shadowed rock rising clear out of the top edge, with mist pouring off its shoulders and down into the valley between the watchers and the ruin.

The city of Men at the mountain's foot went the same way the hall inside it did, on the same day and for the same reason, and it stayed empty for a long lifetime afterwards. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the carved gate that ruin belongs to and the company sighting the mountain at sunset.