For listing the details of publications of the artwork, most information has come from the various volumes themselves, in our library at Vermont Softworks (sc., my bookshelf). For those items which we do not own, however, invaluable help has come from Wayne G. Hammond and Douglas A. Anderson’s 1995 J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography and also from The Compleat Gyde to Tolkien Calendars.
The “H&A” codes, where listed, are also from Hammond and Anderson’s J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography. Those codes beginning with “A” are listed in the chapter “Books by J.R.R. Tolkien.” “D” codes are from “Published Letters and Excerpts,” and “E” are from the chapter listing published collections of “Art by J.R.R. Tolkien” — all as of 1995, of course.
The library holdings information has thus far been gleaned from the “credits” section at the end of many of the published collections of Tolkien’s art — especially the beautifully detailed volumes edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull: J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator, The Art of The Hobbit, and The Art of The Lord of the Rings. It is my intent to re-check and update this information when practical.
Dr. Marc Zender of Tulane University has brought a number of previously overlooked sources of published artwork to my attention, as well as several small but important changes made in later editions of sources I’d worked with. Please see the impressive list of his contributions here. Thank you so much, Marc!
The tags have, for the most part, been assembled by my own observation — and, as such, are subject to such vagaries as the length of the working day and what I ate for breakfast. It is my hope to expand and further regularize their application; if in the meantime anything seems egregiously mistagged or a tag is conspicuously missing, I invite you to suggest changes.
Despite my reliance on the good work of so many others, any errors in this index are strictly my own. But I encourage you to contact me if you spot something that needs to be changed or added.
Some of the content of this page was first posted in the Vermont Softworks blog entry “Announcing the Tolkien Art Index on 5 July 2017.