The Hobbit had two maps; The Lord of the Rings had three, redrawn by his son Christopher Tolkien; The Silmarillion had two. The publishers declined to include a reproduction of the artefact in the first edition of The Lord of the Rings. In most cases a painting begins as a small thumbnail pencil sketch, later developed in a succession of variations, usually of increasing size, still in pencil. The Tolkien scholar Patchen Mortimer similarly comments on the "contentious debate" about him, noting that his many readers find his books and "the attendant languages, histories, maps, artwork, and apocrypha" [13] a huge accomplishment, while his critics "dismiss his work as childish, irrelevant, and worse".

The first opportunity to dip into Tolkien’s work professionally came with Castles, in 1984, which was a heavily illustrated account of the role played by these impressive and often magical structures in myth, romance and literature.Gary Russell has worked widely in media, as a television actor, script consultant, magazine editor, reviewer, novelist and audio producer. Many do not illustrate the final text, but represent moments of creation, illuminating Tolkien's process of writing and design. Tolkien’s various creative writing and design moments, better grasping the amount of detail, reflection, and expression put into the conception of his complex epic fantasy world.

Normally I prefer these types of books to focus on one subject (one movie in this case), but since the story of the Lord of the Rings is one long epic it is actually more useful to see the full range of design work produced over the development of the three films. I really learned to appreciate what an immense job it had been and how precise Tolkien was with every little detail. Once all this is accomplished I then transfer the finished drawing to illustration board and proceed to paint the final version. How, given little over half a century of work, did one man become the creative equivalent of a people?Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). It has been an immense privilege to have been allowed to illustrate so many of Tolkien’s stories, though I see this as just one very pleasurable aspect of a lifetime’s relationship with this extraordinary author and the worlds that he has created. As interested as I am in the creation of Middle-Earth, Christopher’s level of detail sometimes wearied me. The strength of Tolkien’s work is in its fidelity to its roots, which lie in the legends of the Nordic world.