Creative fantasy may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds by bunn  

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Fanwork Notes

This art was created for Mereth Aderthad 2025, to accompany the presentation "Mythmakers vs. the made myths: Exploring a reader’s levels of religious alienation and connection in works about and by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis" by Acha Rezak (Quente).

Fanwork Information

Description:

The mind of Tolkien freed the fantastical to become a part of our world.

Major Characters: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis

Major Relationships:

Genre:

Type: Character/Portrait, Drawing/Painting

Challenges:

Rating: General

Warnings:

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Creative fantasy may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds

This pencil drawing shows both CS Lewis (left) and JRR Tolkien as they might have appeared in the 1920's. Both are smoking pipes.  From Tolkien's pipe, a series of rings leads to an open cage, from which birds, winged jewels and dragons emerge, becoming increasingly transformed as they lead to Telperion in the form of a tropical Baobab tree, behind which Ungoliant lurks, and before which Yavanna appears in the form of Phosop*, an ancient Thai goddess of rice and fertility.   Behind her, an Oliphaunt strides, and nine Nazgul ride grimly along a rocky crest, observed by Sauron's eye. 

CS Lewis's pipe dreams include Squirrel Nutkin, in fur and in armour, Aslan himself, and the ship the Dawn Treader, which is sailing into a fantastical landscape of tall islands intended to recall the landscape of the Andaman Sea. 

Between the imaginings of Tolkien and Lewis, there is a bearded figure with a sack.  He might be a dwarf,  but I imagine him as Father Christmas with his sack,  that strange, unreligious icon of Christmas, walking from The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe into the Father Christmas letters... 

The Anole is taken from a photo Quente sent me of the Anoles that visit her house, I thought he made a lovely protodragon.  Overhead, a North American Bald Eagle stands for the eagles of Manwë. 

A portrait of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis with many of their invented subcreations in the background

Chapter End Notes

* I would have sworn that I chose the image that I used as the reference for Phosop!Yavanna, a small carved statue photographed on display at the Siam Society museum in Bangkok, partly because it came from roughly the same date range in history as Beowulf, but now I come to check my sources, I am completely unable to substantiate this idea or find any date evidence for the statue at all.  Woe is me. Please tell me if you happen to know when that statue is from!   Even if the statue is newer, Wikipedia seems confident that Phosop herself is older than Beowulf. 



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