New ‘Lord of the Rings’ edition to include Tolkien artwork

NEW YORK — An upcoming edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy will include paintings, drawings and other illustrations by the British author for the first time since it was published in the mid-1950s.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books & Media announced Thursday that the new version will come out Oct. 19. Deb Brody, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s vice-president and publisher, noted that Tolkien was already known for his illustrations which appeared in “The Hobbit” and that his artwork for “The Lord of the Rings” had been exhibited in 2018 in New York, Paris and in Oxford, England.

‘Yet the author himself was characteristically modest, dismissive of the obvious and rare artistic talent he possessed despite having had no formal training,” Brody said in a statement. “This modesty meant that relatively little else of his artwork was known of or seen during his lifetime, and generally only in scholarly books afterwards.”

“The Lord of the Rings” books, which include “The Fellowship of the Ring,” “The Two Towers” and “The Return of the King,” are among the bestselling fantasy novels in history. They were adapted into a blockbuster trilogy of films by director Peter Jackson.

The Associated Press