In Memoriam: Pauline Baynes and Derek Brewer

This year Tolkien Studies remarks on the passing of two distinguished members in our field, artist Pauline Baynes, and scholar and publisher Derek Brewer.

Pauline Diana Baynes (1922-2008), the prolific artist and illustrator, was perhaps best known for her illustrations to the seven volumes of C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56). Baynes had previously illustrated Tolkien's Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), and over the years continued her association with Tolkien's works, providing wrap-around cover art for the 1961 Puffin edition of The Hobbit and a triptych for the slip-case of the 1964 deluxe edition of The Lord of the Rings, and illustrating The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962), Smith of Wootton Major (1967), A Map of Middle-earth (poster, 1970), There and Back Again (poster, based on The Hobbit, 1971); Poems and Stories (1980), and Bilbo's Last Song (poster 1974; book 1990). Her final Tolkien-related illustration appears, fittingly, to have been a return to her earliest such work—her map of "The Little Kingdom" was added to the fiftieth anniversary edition of Farmer Giles of Ham (1999).

Derek Brewer (1923-2008), Emeritus Professor of English at Cambridge, was a well-known medievalist and an early champion of Tolkien's writings. Brewer's essay on "The Lord of the Rings as Romance" appeared in J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar and Story-teller: Essays in Memoriam (1979), edited by Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell.