With Bilbo, I saw the peaks of the Misty Mountains. Mirkwood surrounded me, the forest of fairy tales in particularly gnarled, glimmering, spider-infested form. When Bilbo climbed a tree in Mirkwood to spy out the land, I burst through the canopy of the forest after days in the green gloom, and found the sea of bright breeze-ruffled leaves where velvet-black butterflies played. Not — I find now, re-reading The Hobbit — that Tolkien described any of these things in the detail I remember. His was a speedy, storyteller’s art. It made a few precise suggestions, supplied a few nodal adjectives from which the webwork of an imagined world could grow in a child’s mind, and didn’t linger. I made the pictures. I was lucky that my first book put me in the hands of a writer with such a conscious and decided idea of what a reader’s imagination needed. Tolkien had trained himself on the hard nugget-like specifics of Anglo-Saxon and Viking poetry, with its names for things that were almost spells, and its metaphors that were almost riddles. At six I had no idea that the sea had once been the whale-path, or that Tolkien had any predecessors when he had Bilbo boast to Smaug that he was ‘the clue-finder, the web-cutter, the stinging fly’. He made bread, blood and diamonds, and the bees as big as thumbs at Bjorn’s house, seem as fresh and vividly discovered as if they had just been thought of, for the first time in the world. What I did know explicitly was that while’Tolkien’s words were authoritative, his occasional black-and-white drawings in the text only counted as hints I was free to accept or refuse. What Middle-Earth looked like was my business. Illustrations — I decided — were limitations.
— Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built
