the director of the Morgan Library & Museum.

The Morgan, in collaboration Bodleian Libraries,

University of Oxford, and the Tolkien Trust,

presents "Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth,"

on view from January 25 to May 12, 2019.

This exhibition celebrates the creative genius

of one of the most renowned and admired authors of the 20th century.

The Morgan exhibition is your only opportunity in America

to see the largest collection ever assembled

of J. R. R. Tolkien's original drawings, manuscripts, and maps.

[bell tolls]

- For many of us, the name "Tolkien" conjures up visions

of bucolic hillsides and bloody battles--

of little hobbits and beautiful elves and gruesome orcs.

Tolkien had a immensely creative and active mind,

and this of course comes through in the creation of Middle-earth.

Tolkien spent his childhood in the countryside near Birmingham, England,

where he developed a great love of the natural world.

At a very early age, his mother instilled in him

a love of language and literature

that would have immense impact on his future.

Even before he was out of school, he was already creating

a fictitious language that would eventually develop into Elvish.

While he was in college and even in the trenches of World War I,

he was starting to write down the stories

that would eventually become his legendarium,

the history of the Elves.

Drawings depicting a cloaked and hooded figure

walking in a shadowy forest

or landscapes of distant, solitary mountains

that he produced in his teenage years were so embedded in his imagination

that 20 years later, it came out in "The Hobbit."

What was to be a sequel-- another of Bilbo's adventures--

quickly developed and became "The Lord of the Rings."

Manuscript drafts and maps in Tolkien's own hand

show how the characters and the narrative developed

while his illustrations, which were never really intended for publication,

show his own visual concepts of the gates of Moria,

Sauron's fortress of Barad-dûr,

and Galadriel's realm, the forest of Lothlórien.

Tolkien's Middle-earth speaks to so many of us

because it is a complete world.

It has geography. It has history. It has languages.

We are not reading isolated tales--

glimpses of a much richer and interwoven narrative.

These rarely seen items in the exhibition

reveal how, for Tolkien, the production of textual and visual material

went hand in hand in the creation of Middle-earth.