The Witch-king's Fell Beast Looming Over the Rohirrim Army — Print & Oil Painting

The moon has been used as a hole rather than as a lamp. A single ragged break in the cloud, high and slightly left of centre, is the one pale area on the whole sheet, and the animal has been placed directly across it so that every part of the creature is backlit and nothing on it is described. Wings, neck, skull and claws are all one flat charcoal shape.

The wingspan runs the full width of the poster and then some. The near wing leaves the left edge entirely, the far one reaches the right, and between them the neck drops in a long shallow curve to a head carried lower than the shoulders. Two smaller winged shapes cross the sky further off at the right, and they exist to tell you that this one is not far away.

Beneath all of that, a line of cavalry. It runs across the lower third as a single dark band a few millimetres deep, resolved just enough to show helmets and the heads of horses, and out of it rises one white banner on a staff. That banner is the only pale vertical anywhere below the cloud, and it is carrying the entire morale of the picture on its own.

Everything else is weather. The ground is a pale grey wash with no features, the air between the army and the animal is thick with the same grey, and the upper corners darken to near black. There is no landscape, no fortress, no horizon that can be trusted, and no protagonist of any kind: the poster consists of an army and an animal and nothing else.

The creature is not a dragon and the books are careful about that. It is described as a featherless thing out of an older world, bred and fed by an enemy who wanted something that could carry a rider a long way and frighten horses from a distance, which is precisely the job it is doing here. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same animal alone under a full moon and the host below it, seen from among the horses.