Jessica Yates, in ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field: A Commentary’, Mallorn 13 (1979), was the first to note that the poem is a parody of ‘The Battle of the Lake Regillus’ from The Lays of Ancient Rome by Thomas Babington Macaulay. In this, she writes, ‘Tolkien “Saxonised” the Roman world of Macaulay in the preferred use of English vocabulary’, using words such as clan, grail, corslet, helm, flaxen, liegeman, and henchmen which ‘evoke the Germanic heroic tradition’ (p. 5).
In ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’, Mallorn 46 (Autumn 2008), Maggie Burns points out that part of Macaulay’s poem had been a set text at King Edward’s School in 1906 and 1908 in a poetry recital competition mainly for younger boys, one of whom in 1906 would have been *Hilary Tolkien, and that the fiction of a manuscript found by chance ‘was used several times in the Chronicle in the years Tolkien was at King Edward’s’ (p. 16). She also explains some of the poem’s allusions to the school and its customs. Several lines, she notes, were taken directly from Macaulay or only marginally adapted, and the final stanza is not modelled on ‘Lake Regullus’ but on another popular poem by Macaulay, ‘Horatius’. Burns observes that ‘in the late Victorian and Edwardian period it was common to describe team sports in the vocabulary of the battlefield. The message to schoolboys that war was noble, and that it would be their duty to fight, was often conveyed through songs and poems’ (p. 19). The school song of King Edward’s Grammar Schools (c. 1895) makes a similar allusion.
The Battles of the Fords of Isen. Late, unfinished piece of ‘historical analysis’ related to *The Lord of the Rings, published with notes and commentary in *Unfinished Tales (1980), pp. 355–73.
Written by Tolkien no earlier than 1969, it surveys in retrospect the situation in Rohan prior to the War of the Ring, examines Saruman’s aims and strategy, and covers in detail the defending positions taken by the Rohirrim and the actual course of the battles. Associated material, also published in Unfinished Tales, gives particulars about the Marshals of the Mark and their duties at the time of the War, and provides a short history of the Enedwaith beyond Gondor’s western boundary at the Isen, and of the Tower of Orthanc in the Ring of Isengard.
Baynes, Pauline Diana (1922–2008). Pauline Baynes began to draw pictures for books and periodicals in the 1940s. She had almost no formal art training, but a natural talent for illustration and design. Her earliest published work includes pictures for titles in the Perry Colour Book series and for Clover Magic (1944) and Magic Footstool (1946) by Victoria Stevenson, and both pictures and text for her own Victoria and the Golden Bird (1948).
On 10 August 1948 Baynes was asked by Ronald Eames, art editor for George Allen & Unwin (*Publishers), to submit specimen illustrations for ‘an adult fairy story (complete with dragon and giant!)’ requiring ‘some historical and topographical (Oxford and Wales) realism’ in its setting: Tolkien’s *Farmer Giles of Ham (George Allen & Unwin archive, University of Reading). She replied at once, noting in jest, by way of credentials, that she had sketched in Oxford and picked potatoes in Wales. Around the beginning of October 1948 Tolkien looked at her portfolio and was charmed especially by ink and watercolour cartoons she had drawn after medieval manuscript illuminations, whose character perfectly complemented his mock-medieval story of Farmer Giles. Formally commissioned, Baynes quickly produced more than the required number of drawings. Tolkien found them to be in such perfect accord with his text that he declared: ‘they are more than illustrations, they are a collateral theme. I showed them to my friends whose polite comment was that they reduced my text to a commentary on the drawings’ (letter to Ronald Eames, 16 March 1949, Letters, p. 133).
After Farmer Giles of Ham was published with success in 1949 Baynes was Tolkien’s illustrator of choice. On 20 December 1949 he wrote that he had ‘two (large) books of mythical, legendary, or elvish kind’ which he expected to go into production the following year, and hoped that Baynes could provide ‘some illustration or decorations’ (Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois) – *‘The Silmarillion’ and *The Lord of the Rings. Baynes understood his request to be for headpieces and pictures to appear in margins, and was willing to produce them. But ‘The Silmarillion’ was unfinished, and the production budget for The Lord of the Rings made little allowance for art. Baynes was engaged by Allen & Unwin, however, to make a drawing of Aragorn’s standard (The Lord of the Rings, Book V, Chapter 7) for a newspaper advertisement, published in October 1955, and to paint a triptych view of Middle-earth to cover the slipcase of a deluxe boxed set of The Lord of the Rings (1964; parts were reproduced on the cover of the first one-volume paperback, 1968).
In 1961 the first paperback edition of *The Hobbit was published in the Puffin series by Penguin Books, with a wraparound cover by Baynes. In that same year she married Fritz Otto Gasch (1919–1988), a former German prisoner of war. They were good friends with Tolkien and his wife, exchanged letters, and visited the Tolkiens in *Bournemouth.
Late in 1961 Tolkien suggested that Baynes illustrate a selection of his poems. *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book, first published in 1962, is enlivened by a variety of her pictures. Tolkien approved her work, except for her cover art, the elements of which he felt should be reversed between front and back, and her full-page illustration for *The Hoard which depicts a young warrior without helm or shield, and a dragon facing away from the mouth of his cave, a poor position from which to defend it.
Partly in collaboration with Tolkien, Baynes drew a poster-map of Middle-earth with figures and scenes from The Lord of the Rings (1970). They consulted closely on geographical detail and nomenclature, as evidenced by a copy of the general Middle-earth map removed from The Lord of the Rings which Baynes and Tolkien covered with annotations (held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford). Tolkien was unhappy with the artist’s depiction of characters from The Lord of the Rings, in panels at the top and bottom of the poster, but he had made no objection when Baynes showed him the finished art before publication.
Baynes also illustrated Tolkien’s *Smith of Wootton Major (1967); she drew a second poster-map, There and Back Again (1971), based on The Hobbit (avoiding the illustration of characters except for the dragon and spiders); she depicted the scene of the last ship sailing from the Grey Havens (The Lord of the Rings, Book VI, Chapter 9) for the British poster edition of *Bilbo’s Last Song (1974), and for the book version of that poem (1st edn. 1990) illustrated the final chapter of The Lord of the Rings in a series of painted vignettes; she painted new covers for the 1975 and 1976 editions (respectively) of Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham; she produced the cover art for a paperback edition (1978) of Tolkien’s translations of *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo; she added new art to previous work in the reprint collection *Poems and Stories (1980), in the process correcting her illustration for The Hoard; and she contributed a map of the Little Kingdom to the fiftieth anniversary edition of Farmer Giles of Ham (1999). A painting made by Baynes in the mid-1970s, intended for a new edition of *Tree and Leaf, was first published at last in 2003 as insert art for a compact disc recording by Derek Jacobi of Smith of Wootton Major and *Leaf by Niggle.
Art by Pauline Baynes has also appeared in a wide range of books other than those by Tolkien, including Medieval Tales by Jennifer Westwood (1967), The Times Cookery Book by Katie Stewart (1972), and A Companion to World Mythology by Richard Barber (1979). Her illustrations for A Dictionary of Chivalry by Grant Uden (1968) won her the coveted Kate Greenaway medal. Her most famous work, however, is her art for the seven volumes of the Chronicles of Narnia by Tolkien’s friend *C.S. Lewis, first published in 1950–6. Altogether she had hundreds of commissions for books and magazines, as well as for products such as greetings cards and cigarette packages.
See also Wayne G. Hammond, ‘Pauline Baynes’, British Children’s Writers, 1914–1960 (1996). The greater part of the artist’s archive is held in the Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown,