A talk with Ted Nasmith, the illustrator who shaped Tolkien’s fantasy universe One of the most famous creators associated with the author of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ reflects on the eternity of the great fantasy epic and its links with classical art The rain is drumming on the roof of the indoor bar of the Palacio de Avilés hotel, in northern Spain . It is summer 2024 and the greenery of the building’s sheltered French gardens, visible from here, almost evokes those of the Shire, the most peaceful region of Middle Earth, where the hobbits invented by J. R.
R. Tolkien spent their days with no bigger events in their lives than enjoying the smoke rings blown by their long pipes and feasting on the crispy bacon of their second breakfast. Ted Nasmith, 68, is certainly not a hobbit.
But the Canadian artist does have the appearance of a wise and serene academic, someone similar to the figure that comes to mind when thinking of Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings , The Hobbit and The Silmarillion , among other fundamental titles of fantasy literature, to whom this classically trained painter has dedicated the best of his successful career. Nasmith was the star of the 13th Celsius 232 Festival, the biggest fantasy festival in Spain, which owes its name to the conversion of the temperature scale with which Ray Bradbury titled his famous novel Fahrenheit 451 . The artist has illustrated dozens of scenes, very much in the biblical style of the classics, of those wonderf.