The Siege of Gondor Grond wolf ram — Print & Oil Painting

The entire canvas is one hue. Sky, smoke, fire, stone, armour, horseflesh and blood are all painted in oxblood, brick and a dull orange, and there is no blue, no green and no true black anywhere in it. Working a whole picture in a single family like this is a decision that either collapses into mud or turns the subject into a furnace, and here it does the second.

The machine is the subject and it has been drawn as machinery. A long low carriage runs across the middle of the frame on heavy spoked wheels, and along its whole length lies the ram itself, a black shaft ending at the right in a wolf's head with the jaws open and the teeth picked out in pale strokes. Chains and cradles hold it slung to the frame. Nothing about it is decorative.

It is being hauled rather than swung. Two heavy tusked animals lean into the traces at the right, dwarfed by their own load, and a rider on a black horse waits at the left where the carriage is heading. Above them all a small burning object crosses the sky trailing sparks, and a pale column with a figure on top stands at the upper left, the only upright architecture in the frame.

The bottom quarter is a killing floor. Bodies lie tangled across the whole width, a fallen horse on its side at the right, a soldier sprawled face up at the centre with the light catching him, discarded shields and spears among them. The painter has kept them soft and unindividual, so the eye registers a quantity rather than any one person.

The book gives this thing a name and a genealogy. It is called after the hammer of the first Dark Lord, its head is shaped in the likeness of a ravening wolf, great beasts drag it, mountain trolls swing it, and words of ruin have been said over it before it ever reaches a gate. Very little else in the story is described with that much ceremony. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the assault this machine opens and the city burning while it works.