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Museum-Quality Matte Paper Print available in two sizes:
12" x 16" (30cm x 40cm): $35.00
24" x 32" (60cm x 80cm): $48.00
 
“The feast that they now saw was greater and more magnificent than before; and at the head of a long line of feasters sat a woodland king with a crown of leaves upon his golden hair…The elvish folk were passing bowls from hand to hand and across the fires, and some were harping and many were singing.” - The Hobbit, Chapter VIII: Flies and Spiders
 
I am not sure whether any other single moment in all of J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium has quite the same quality of enchantment as when Bilbo and the dwarves leave the path to chase the wandering lights and music through the dark forest of Mirkwood, glimpse scenes of delight through the trees, and yet every time they try to join the feast, all goes dark and the Wood-elves vanish. I was about five years old when my father first read me The Hobbit, and this was the scene that stood out most vividly to me from that first unforgettable telling. I could see the beckoning lanterns and torches almost as if they were hanging before me, just out of reach.
 
As a little Irish-American girl, I had already absorbed the sense of the “perilous realm” from my mother’s stories and music, and I didn’t have to be told how chancy it was for the travelers to follow faërie lights in the forest, but I so longed for poor Bilbo to succeed and to be given something to eat! This fine art print from my original, hand-done painting captures that moment just on the edge of stepping over that liminal threshold into the faërie world that no one knew better than Professor Tolkien. The Wood-elves feast and dance and sing and harp amid the twinkling lights as the hobbit and dwarves look on with longing in the shadows.
 
In The Lord of the Rings, we learn more about these woodsy folk, and that the Elvenking who captures Thorin and Company is Thranduil, son of Oropher and father of Legolas. Thranduil is of the Silvan elves, whose family once lived in Elu Thingol’s woodland realm of Doriath in the First Age, and his folk are rather different than some of the other elves the world would later meet in Tolkien’s writings. The Mirkwood episode exemplifies that, while elves may be beautiful and wondrous folk, they can also be perilous for those who encounter them.
 
I agree with both Professor Tom Shippey's scholarship in The Road to Middle-earth about the influence of the Middle English Sir Orfeo being a “master text” for Tolkien’s portrayal of these first-glimpsed elves, and with John Garth’s beautiful section in The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien about the professor’s debt to Celtic mythology in envisioning such mysterious folk. Proud Thranduil is not very kind to the dwarves, due to their shared history of long enmity. Nevertheless, by capturing them, he does, in essence, rescue them from being lost in the forest, without which, they might never have fulfilled their quest and laid the essential groundwork for the eventual destruction of the Ring.
 
Is there a spot in your home that could use a little enchantment? This fine art print of “The Feast of the Wood-elves in Mirkwood” is on museum quality paper and will bring story, song, and wonder to any room. A magical gift for anyone in your life who enjoys great tales from Faërie!