Roger Garland’s 1983 illustration Battle of Pelennor Fields depicts a pivotal moment in the narrative of The War of the Ring. To provide context, battle is raging about the city of Minas Tirith. South of the road, the Haradrim chieftain has been slain by Théoden, and his standard thrown down, and now the Lord of the Mark lies mortally wounded beneath the body of his horse Snowmane. Abandoned and powerless, the stricken Théoden can only watch as the Witch-king and his winged steed descend upon the battlefield like a "falling cloud".¹

Garland’s illustration was first published in the 1984 edition of the "official" J.R.R. Tolkien Calendar by Unwin Paperbacks, where it featured as the image for October.² The caption which accompanies the image in the calendar reads "The Lord of the Nazgûl. The Battle of the Pelennor Fields. The Return of the King". The original illustration is housed at the Garland family’s Lakeside Gallery, near Launceston in Cornwall.

Battle of Pelennor Fields is painted in oils on board and is in portrait orientation, with the main figurative components rendered in fine detail beneath a large expanse of impressionistic sky. This is a familiar format for Garland, and one which he uses often in his book-cover designs. In the Unwin calendar the image (seen here) has been heavily cropped, with most of the sky removed. Regarding the subject matter of the illustration, Garland has distilled key elements of the first pages of Book Five, Chapter VI of The Return of the King (The Battle of the Pelennor Fields) to create a striking image rich in ambiguity and iconographic detail.

I have chosen to begin my analysis of the illustration by first reviewing its central figure; the Lord of the Nazgul - who, for the purposes of brevity, I will refer to as the Witch-king. Garland’s image portrays him swathed in a ragged black cloak and wearing an ornate iron crown that is adorned with elaborately twisted spikes. He has no facial features save for two fiery red eyes, which burn with an intensity far in excess of the "deadly gleam" described by Tolkien.³ Such is their magnified brightness, in fact, that it is possible to extrapolate a symbolic meaning to their glow, with the Witch-king’s eyes becoming a visual signifier for the power of Sauron, manifest in his deadliest servant.

The Witch-king’s left hand is depicted raised palm upwards as though he were revelling in the terror of his arrival upon the battlefield, and in his right hand he wields a huge ball-and-chain flail which glimmers red in the light of his eyes. Here Garland has diverged from the text, eschewing the "great black mace" referred to by Tolkien (which the author presumably envisioned as consisting of a heavy iron head set upon a wooden or iron shaft) in favour of a far more flexible weapon.⁴ This apparently arbitrary substitution facilitates a neat compositional device whereupon the curl of the chain becomes a path for the eye to follow, gravitating the viewer’s gaze towards the centre of the image.

The winged creature which the Witch-king sits upon holds its scaly wings partially open, as though mantling the body of Théoden’s horse. Its two sharp pinions actually touch the ground on either end of the dead animal and the general appearance of its wings closely correlates with Tolkien’s text; where the creature is described as possessing wings like "webs of hide between horned fingers".⁵ The beast’s hooked talons also dig into the horse’s flesh, and its sinuous neck and beaked head are craned upwards in an attitude which resembles that of a gigantic vulture hunched over its prey. The dark, sombre colours of both creature and rider contrast with the gleaming white flanks of Snowmane, and the red of the Witch-king’s eyes are mirrored again in the trickle of blood from the horse’s mouth.

The right foreground of the illustration is dominated by a very large broken standard which juts upright from the ground, its cloth billowing in the wind. The design on the standard depicts a writhing black serpent on a blood-red ground; the emblem of the Haradrim chieftain slain by Théoden moments before the Witch-king’s arrival.⁶ The shaft of the standard also bears an ornate spear-point which jabs upwards toward the similarly spear-shaped bulk of Minas Tirith, a potent symbol for the furious assault which is taking place upon the city.

The background of the illustration is filled with the chaos of battle; siege engines, riders, phalanxes of men and orcs and massive smoking fires that darken the Pelennor Fields. The gate of Minas Tirith is also depicted in its broken state, smashed by the battering ram Grond, whilst the shadows on the right-hand edge of the Citadel are imbued with a sinister, threatening hue.⁷ Above the entire scene looms the Storm of Mordor, pictured by Garland as a series of huge, rolling banks of cloud, illuminated here and there by the faintest glow of sunrise.

One obvious, glaring omission from Garland’s illustration is the figure of Théoden, who, at this point in Tolkien’s narrative, lies trapped and mortally wounded beneath the body of Snowmane. In Garland’s image there appears to be no trace of the king; no weapons, no armour, nothing at all save for the saddle-pad, and head-collar left on the dead horse. Has Garland simply forgotten to include him? This would appear rather unlikely, considering his pedigree as a Tolkien illustrator. Which, leaves us to ponder another possibility — that the omission is intentional.

Actually, it is not only Théoden who is absent from Battle of Pelennor Fields. There are other characters missing from the illustration who are present at this point in the book. Éowyn, is a good example, and we also have Merry and the other knights of Rohan who had accompanied Théoden in his attack on the Haradrim. The omission of the knights is perhaps the most easily explained, with their absence from the image an obvious allusion to the terror of the Witch-king’s arrival; an event which caused many of Théoden’s knights to be thrown "grovelling to the ground" or become "mastered by the madness of their steeds" and "borne far away".⁸

Éowyn and Merry’s absence, however, is less straightforward. The hobbit might be assumed to be crawling along the ground somewhere, either behind the Witch-king, or outside of the frame; heeded no more than "a worm in the mud" as Tolkien describes it.⁹ Rather inadequate as explanations go, but feasible nonetheless. But Éowyn’s omission is another matter. Her presence is integral to the ensuing scene, where, in the guise of Dernhelm, she confronts the Witch-king and commands him to "Begone" and "Leave the dead in peace!".¹⁰ One possible reason for her absence could be that, for the purposes of the illustration, we, the viewer, are supposed to assume her viewpoint, looking in on the scene. She is us, and we are perceiving the scene through her eyes as she prepares to make a defiant stand against the Witch-king. However, even this explanation is problematic. After all, Éowyn’s primary motivation is to protect Théoden (who could be either dead or alive at this juncture) from the evil attentions of the Witch-king and his carnivorous steed. Therefore, if this first-person construct is to have any emotional veracity, surely Théoden must figure somewhere in the image?

There is another possible reading of Garland’s illustration, one which intersects with the motif of the fiery red eyes and the blood-red standard; Battle of the Pelennor Fields is primarily a visual expression of the power of Mordor. Théoden, Éowyn and Merry are not present within the image, because to Sauron — signified here by the Witch-king (who in reality is little more than a vessel for the Dark Lord’s power)— they are nothing, they have no substance, they do not matter. Their absence is representative of Sauron’s blindness to all those whom he deems small or weak.

Of course, not everything in the image is desolate, Garland does give us small signs of hope. For example, the red standard of the Haradrim is broken, their chieftain has been slain, and the sun is glimmering through the clouds behind the Witch-king. Most importantly of all, the bright form of Snowmane remains intact. The horse may be dead, but long after the Witch-king and his Master have gone, the grass will grow green on Snowmane’s Howe.¹¹

Notes:

¹ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (London: HarperCollins, 2011), 828–840.

² Roger Garland, illus., The J.R.R. Tolkien Calendar 1984 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1983).

³ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, 840.

⁴ Ibid., 840.

⁵ Ibid., 840.

⁶ Ibid., 839–840.

⁷ Ibid., 828–829.

⁸ Ibid., 840.

⁹ Ibid., 841.

¹⁰ Ibid., 841.

¹¹ Ibid., 845.