Title: Eeriness
Artist: J.R.R. Tolkien

'Eeriness', [January 1914]

A lonely figure contemplates the empty road ahead, while hostile trees stretch out their clawed branches menacingly. Could this be an early iteration of the wizard Gandalf, who first appears in The Hobbit as 'an old man with a staff...a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, a silver scarf over which his long white beard hung down below his waist, and immense black boots.'?

MS. Tolkien Drawings 87, fol. 10
© The Tolkien Trust 1995