A Warrior Charging Through Rain Toward Helm's Deep — Print & Oil Painting

The rain has been ruled onto the left half of the canvas and stops dead where the fortress begins. Long straight strokes of pale grey fall at a slight angle from the top edge down to the ground, dense enough to grey out the whole of that side, and the right half is left dry and dark. One picture, two weathers, and the line between them runs down the middle.

The building has been painted by somebody interested in masonry. A square tower with two lit windows near its top stands at the centre on a battered plinth, a curtain wall runs back from it to the right with a row of small arched openings picked out in warm light, a covered stair climbs the rock behind, and the cliff above is dense unlit foliage. Every course of stone is described.

Along the base of the wall, at the far end of the flooded ground, a low band of orange light burns steadily. Out of it rise dozens of thin dark verticals, evenly spaced and slightly irregular, which turn out to be upright pikes and spears standing in the water. The host itself is never drawn. It is present only as a field of shafts and a fire behind them.

The single figure is at the bottom left, small, silhouetted, knees bent, one arm carrying a curved blade above his head. He is not charging so much as braced, and he is the only thing in the picture with a human outline. Brightness on this canvas is the lowest in the whole group, and it is that darkness rather than the pose that makes the moment read as the one before contact.

What the painting leaves out is where everybody else went. Behind that wall, up a narrow gorge, the country people had been sent into a system of caves so large that a dwarf who saw them by torchlight afterwards could not stop describing them, and his kin later moved in and lived there. The fortress in this picture is not a garrison holding a position. It is a door with a population behind it. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same fortress painted whole in daylight from up the gorge and the moment that wall is opened.