Upcoming edition of The Lord of the Rings to include drawings by JRR Tolkien for first time since publication

New York: An upcoming edition of JRR 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 on 25 March that the new version will come out on 19 October. 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 best-selling fantasy novels in history. They were adapted into a blockbuster trilogy of films by director Peter Jackson.