J.R.R. Tolkien

This ode to the British writer and academic John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973), who became world famous for his fantasy cycle The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and the posthumously published The Silmarillion, is found in a letter dated 29 June 1962 that Escher wrote to his son George.* His son Arthur had treated him to a copy of The Hobbit earlier that year, a book Escher read voraciously whilst bedridden, when reading became a useful means of escape. Escher had been in the hospital for two months after an emergency admission on 12 April when a large swelling was discovered in his colon.

In the letter to George he had the following to say about The Hobbit:

Escher was without hesitation in counting himself among the fantasy-lovers rather than among the realists. Hence there were significant similarities between the Dutch graphic artist and the British writer. Escher and Tolkien were contemporaries — the writer was just over six years older and he survived the graphic artist by only one and a half years. Both were well-educated, rational men, who nevertheless often abandoned reason in their work to give priority to the mythical, the imaginative, and the enigmatic. They wanted to excite and move their viewers and readers, without any intention of imbuing their works with an inner meaning or message. Even though a work could be ‘applicable’ to the thinking and experience of those viewers and readers. In 1966 Tolkien wrote:

Escher and Tolkien both lacked philosophical pretensions, and left any lessons their viewers and readers could derive from their works entirely to those viewers’ and readers’ own efforts. For example, Escher would not have made much of the reincarnation message he is alleged to have included in a work like Reptiles (1943). Another similarity is their shared admiration for the writer Lewis Carroll, in whose Alice books they recognised many elements that they would adopt in their own work.

From The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings

Whether Tolkien was familiar with Escher’s work is not known, but when you read passages from The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings it is sometimes as if he is describing a landscape by Escher. From The Hobbit:

And:

Works like Tropea, Calabria (1931), Bonifacio (1928), and Barbarano, Cimino (1929) do spring to mind immediately. And it takes little imagination to see the similarities between Escher’s print Castle in the Air (1928), his interpretation of high-lying towns such as Santa Severina and Morano and the mythical fortified city of Minas Tirith from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.