Helm Hammerhand

One of two color covers for an online game centered around the Long Winter, an event which occurred in middle-earth in TA. 2758, some 260 years before the war of the ring, in which the Rohirrim under King Helm Hammerhand held out against the invading Dunlandings in the deeping valley that, centuries later, would still bear his name.

Helm's personal story is one of a king and a great man, turned by loss and desperation into an animal, set against this elemental backdrop of the relentless cold and snowfall. Here we see him (I imagine) as his people find him one frosty morning, frozen to death, still standing watch out on the Dike. It is one of those images that heroic legends are made out of, and Helm does live on (in the legends of both the rohirrim and the dunlandings) as the guardian spirit of the Deep, awed by his people and feared by their enemies.

Old, lean, crazed Helm, honed by grief into a primordial spirit of vengeance, seemed a good single image for the game's cover; he is middle-earth's King Lear (or at least a fine contender for the spot) and like Lear - or Hidetora, his japanese stand-in from Kurosawa's "Ran," a heavy influence on my portrayal of the character - his face tells his story. I wanted him to have the feel of a stone cliff-face, too steep for standing snow-cover, rising up out of the snowy field, like the hornburg itself Link

A wonderful thing about Tolkien's stories and characters (and very appealing from an illustrative point of view) is that they have a resonance and familiarity to them; many of them, while they are independently themselves, play into this larger world of mythic archetype, as if they were merely middle-earth's versions of their stories and characters (like Turin, whose story has significant shades of Oediphus, or the two trees of the valar, evoking both the nordic Yggdrasil and the two trees in Eden). It seems fitting (and often very easy) when illustrating Tolkien's world, to do likewise. Who is this old man out in the snow? Is he Odin? Santa Claus? Old Man Winter? Jack Frost? Jack London? Jack Torrence? In a way he's all of the above, and of course, he is also Helm.