Storied webs

An exhibition of the Aubusson Tolkien tapestries in Paris was too tantalizingly close to resist. You can just about do a day trip by train from Cambridge to Paris: arrive at St Pancras, walk across the station, there’s Eurostar. It meant an early start, but we were at Gare du Nord by 11am. What’s not to like?

A steady walk across the city got us to venue, the Collège des Bernardins, bang on time for entry into the exhibition. A former Cistercian college of the University of Paris, it’s now a venue for exhibitions, seminars, etc. There are some conferences happening connected to the exhibition (which runs till 18th May), and on the day we were there, there was an all-day screening of the movie trilogy (we went for lunch instead and boy was it worth it). Six o’clock train back to St Pancras, and straight onto a train home.

The tapestries are simply amazing. The setting - space and lighting - shows them off so beautifully; they’re as you imagine they might have hung in a hall in Minas Tirith or Rivendell. Some of them are images that I’ve known more or less since I’ve been able to read, but because of the scale, you’re able to catch tiny details that you couldn’t see before. “Conversation with Smaug” is packed full of runes and jools and skellingtons, and there was golden thread on the hoard that glinted as you moved round.

The scale of the pieces too meant that you were more immersed in the scenes than ever before. With “Beleg finds Gwindor in Taur-na-Fúin”, which I’ve only seen in pretty muddy and washed-out reproductions, the contrast between the dark of the trees and the light between them becomes visible, the depth and density of the forest palpable. You felt like you could step into the picture. Come away, stolen child, to the water and the wild…

Tolkien is a good watercolourist, but one thing he’s not great at is figures. Landscape really is his forte. The exception to this is the creatures: the various sea-creatures of “The Gardens of the Mer-king’s Palace” and, of course, Smaug’s magnificent face (close-up below). But the highlight of the exhibition for me (apart from Smaug’s face) was the huge map of Middle-earth: the biggest of the tapestries, and the most engrossing. I couldn’t take a picture which did the scale justice; having said that, part of the pleasure of looking at it was studying small specific areas. Stitch by stitch, a world is woven. Very Tolkien.