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An insight into putting together the PhD appendices – pictures galore

At the moment, I’m neck-deep into revisions of my PhD thesis text, and into putting together the appendices. Of course a PhD on J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien must have appendices. Specifically, the iconographic part of the appendices (the “artists’ interviews” part was completed in Spring, see my Tipeee page for weekly updates!).

That means I’m going through the powerpoint files I made for each chapter, and collating them into one big file that will be sent to jury members so they can actually see what I’m talking about. A lot of the pictures are copyrighted (from J.R.R. Tolkien’s to Alan Lee’s) so no, this file will not be made public. But I’m not here today to talk about rights. I thought I’d give you an insight into what this means to gather those images.

First of all, there are several possible sources for those images.

  1. Some of them are available on the Internet.
  • Out of those, about two thirds (this is a feeling, not a fact) can’t be used because of poor resolution, or because there is text superimposed, or because they are cropped. This crop can be insidious. If you open a copy of The Lord of the Rings illustrated by Alan Lee, you’ll notice that all the pictures have a light grey band working as a frame. A small detail, you’ll probably think. But if you’ve read “On Fairy-Stories” and especially the endnote H which features extensively in my PhD thesis, you know that J.R.R. Tolkien has thoughts™ on framing devices. And so, that thin band of grey watercolour can’t quite be ignored and I can’t use those images.
  • A third of the pictures available online is cropped correctly, with varying successes in colour palettes (a lot of them are very pink for some reason). Those images I can use, usually after tweaking the colours in a photo editing app.
  1. Some of the illustrations can’t be found online. When I started my PhD in 2017 (ouch), that was more often the case than it is now. Then, the only solution I’d found was to scan / photograph the illustration in the published book and photo-edit it with whatever skill and knowledge I had (limited but growing). A significant part of the time I spent on my Master’s thesis (2015-2017) was dedicated to photographing each of the 50 illustrations by Alan Lee for The Lord of the Rings and editing them one by one. And then I found out I shouldn’t have changed from RVB to CMJN because in the appendix volume I printed, the pictures turned out green. Limited knowledge, I said.

But, you might ask, editing pictures is well and good, but what is my reference? How do I know what the original picture looks like? Sadly, I haven’t visited Alan Lee’s studio and gazed lovingly at all the originals. And even if I had, I would have had to colour-edit my photos with the originals in front of me, and I doubt I would have been welcome in Alan Lee’s place for however many hours this would have required.

That means I have to work from the published versions of the images. And that’s where it gets funny, because from one edition to the next, the colorimetry is quite different. As far as The Lord of the Rings is concerned, I’m working from the 1992 HarperCollins edition in English, and the 2014-2016 Christian Bourgois edition in French whose back cover claims that the pictures were scanned again for more accurate results. I haven’t checked that claim but usually the French publishing house works in tandem with HarperCollins, so it might be that there was an edition of LotR with newly-scanned pictures before 2014 and the French publishers used those rather than the pictures they’d included so far in French illustrated editions.

To take The Black Gate is Closed as an example, I still end up with… three different versions of the illustration, because the one on the cover doesn’t match colour-wise the one printed within the book in English. And the French one matches neither, of course.

A spread showing the dust-jacket of the 1991 Lord of the Rings, then the book open at the page of the same illustration, and on the right the French edition open at the page of the same illustration.

It all boils down to my own judgment, then. For instance, I think the French edition version is too dark and blue-toned, but in the English edition version, the sky has a pink tinge to it that feels a bit off. Actually, the English cover provides a good middle ground, so I’m using that as my standard, but I can’t take a picture from that because of the text superimposed.

I haven’t kept the raw picture I took in 2016 because there’s only so much my free Dropbox account can handle, but the first picture below is the photo I took of the book and edited roughly in Photoshop because I couldn’t find a suitable reproduction online.

Notice the warm tone of the picture and the wobbly borders – that’s because I photographed the picture in the book and even with the best intention I wasn’t ready to rip the page out to be able to lay it flat.

The second one is when I went back to this picture in March 2025 and edited it a second time. But no matter how much time I spent on it, the borders of the picture were still wobbly and of course that annoys me immensely.

The colours are better, borders are still not straight.

So on a fine morning in October I went again on a little picture-hunt online, dodging Pinterest-related results, and found a reproduction that included the much-needed grey border! As you can tell from the third picture, it is very… blue.

But by now there’s no stopping me, and with a wave of the picture-editing software wand, ta-da! The fourth picture has straight edges, enough resolution to make out the details, and a satisfying colour palette.

Thankfully, not every picture demands such a time-intensive process. For instance, the ones from Beren and Lúthien were quickly available in very good-quality scans, so I didn’t have to spend hours on them.

I also can make compromises, for instance using the scans Ted Nasmith has very generously uploaded on his website with a watermark. I know that the artists himself checked the colours to make sure they were up to his standards, so I am using those.

I hope this insight into my PhD process was interesting to you! If you want to have regular updates, do check out my Tipeee page where you can subscribe for as low as 1€ / 1$ a month and have access to years of archives.


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Marie Bretagnolle (20 octobre 2025). An insight into putting together the PhD appendices – pictures galore. Tolkien & illustration. Consulté le 16 mars 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/14zdd


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