The Witch-king's Fellbeast Flying Beneath a Full Moon — Print & Oil Painting

This is the only picture in the group with no fight in it, and the temperature changes completely as a result. One animal crosses an empty night sky, seen broadside and almost level with the viewer, and nothing in the frame is reacting to it.

The whole canvas has been pushed into a single colour. Cloud, land, water and the creature itself are all versions of the same black-green, and there are only two breaks: the moon at the upper left, a pale disc behind torn cloud, and a thin silver seam far below where a river or a flooded field catches it. The land is otherwise a low dark band with two hill shoulders in it.

The anatomy repays attention because it is not a dragon's. The neck is long and thin and carried low, the head small and lipless with a beaked jaw hanging open, the hind legs trailing loose instead of tucked, and the tail whipping back in a lazy curl. The wings are stretched wide, ribbed with long finger bones, and pierced here and there with thin patches where the sky shows through.

The rider is nearly incidental, and that is the point. He sits far forward at the base of the neck, a hunched bundle of black with a spiked crown, reins gathered in both hands, drawn no larger than the animal's shoulder. Making him small is what allows the beast to be the subject.

Tolkien takes some trouble never to call these creatures dragons. The one that carries this rider is described as a bird-shaped thing out of an older world, naked, carrying neither quill nor feather, its wings webs of hide stretched between horned fingers. A painting that gives it a heron's neck and a bare leathery span rather than a dragon's bulk has read that carefully. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same animal studied close in the same green dark and the shadow it throws when it comes down over an army.