Pauline Baynes, the artist and illustrator who died on August 1 aged 85, brought the worlds of CS Lewis’s Narnia and JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth to life with her superb line drawings.
In 1948 Tolkien was visiting his publishers, George Allen & Unwin, to talk about some disappointing artwork that they had commissioned for Farmer Giles of Ham, when he spotted some witty reinterpretations of medieval marginalia from the Luttrell Psalter that greatly appealed to him. These, it turned out, had been sent to the publishers “on spec” by the then unknown Pauline Baynes.
Tolkien asked that the person behind these drawings immediately be set to work illustrating Farmer Giles of Ham. Tolkien was delighted with the outcome, declaring that Pauline Baynes had “reduced my text to a commentary on her drawings”. Further collaboration between Tolkien and his Farmer Giles illustrator followed, and a enduring friendship was formed.
The work that had been done for JRR Tolkien led to a commission to illustrate CS Lewis’s Narnia books, though she was uncomfortable with the Christian allegory found in the Narnia stories.
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