Lotr + Positivity: Wonder

lotr + positivity: wonder

He found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams.

Lothlórien

“There are no trees like the trees of that land. For in the autumn their leaves fall not, but turn to gold. Not till the spring comes & the new green opens do they fall, & then the boughs are laden with yellow flowers; and the floor of the wood is golden, and golden is the roof, and its pillars are of silver, for the bark of the trees is smooth and grey.“

The Dedication by Edmund Blair Leighton

The Dedication is an important rediscovery in Edmund Blair Leighton's oeuvre. Known only through a black and white photogravure published in 1908 it has not appeared on the open market for over seventy-five years. The picture is one of several painted in the 1900s in which a knight and his lady are seen in incidents illustrative of the code of chivalry. This series included The Accolade; and God Speed

Although not specifically Arthurian in subject matter, these pictures represent a late phase of the Victorian revival of interest in the national legend. Pictorially, they have many antecedents. Perhaps the most obvious are William Dyce's murals in the Queen's Robing Room in the House of Lords, in which the artist used incidents from the Arthurian stories to embody abstract concepts such as religion, chivalry, generosity and mercy, and the chivalric subjects that Rossetti and his followers were so fond of in the late 1850s.

In this painting by Leighton we see a knight and a noble lady in a Church kneeling before an alter as the knight pledges his sword in his holy cause and the noble lady offers up a prayer with her eyes closed and hands clasped; while in the background we see a soldier waiting outside, holding the knights horse.

EMMA (2020) dir.  Autumn de Wilde

Caravaggio, Saint Catherine of Alexandria (detail), c.1598

Robin Wright as Buttercup THE PRINCESS BRIDE (1987) dir. Rob Reiner