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The Lord of the Rings · J. R. R. Tolkien

The story behind Minas Tirith, Literary Plans No. 1

The scene

From The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien (1955), Book V, Chapter 1. Pippin rides in with Gandalf at dawn and sees the city for the first time: seven circles cut into the mountain, each wall higher than the last, each gate facing a different way, and the great keel of rock splitting every circle but the first, up to the Citadel and the White Tower. I wanted to see it the way an engineer would, every level placed where the book puts it. The labels mark the Great Gate, the Houses of Healing, Fen Hollen and the seven circles. An inspired-by print: nothing in it is taken from any film or game, and it isn't an official map.

The style

An engineer's blueprint from about 1900: ruled lines, compass arcs, fine hatching for cut stone, white on an uneven Prussian blue with faint fold creases. Every word on the sheet, the tags, notes, scale and title block, is typeset by me.

The inspiration

The look comes from a real cyanotype blueprint of a railway coaling dock, Scranton, Pennsylvania, about 1900. I borrowed its white line on blue and the calm precision of an engineer's sheet. The trestle isn't here; the city is.

Style reference: a cyanotype blueprint, Scranton (about 1900). A real railway engineer's drawing of a coaling dock: fine white line on Prussian blue, the look we gave the City of Kings.

How it's made

I design each scene and refine it until it feels right. It's a print of a digital artwork made in the style of a cyanotype blueprint, not a hand-made cyanotype or an original print. A typeset caption under the picture names the book and the work it follows. Each one carries my printed "Chapter & Scene" signature in the margin.

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