So welcome to this instalment of the Oxford Fantasy podcast.
I'm Dr. Caroline Batten, and I am here today with Emma Sillett, who is a librarian at Trinity College working with the Danson Collection.
And she's going to take us through some really exciting Arthur Rackham illustrations in some beautiful volumes the library holds.
Take it away, Emma. Well, welcome. First of all, to the Danson library, which is something of a hidden jewel in Trinity College, Oxford.
And I'm really excited that we're going to be talking about a small but spellbinding
collection of Arthur Rackham illustrated books and talking through some of our favourites.
Awesome. Well, to sort of kick us off, would you tell us a little bit about Arthur Rackham?
Who is he? What's his back story? Catch us up. So Arthur Rackham was an intriguing figure.
He was born in eighteen sixty seven into a large, respectable middle class family, and he had something of a double life in his early years.
He started off as an insurance clerk at the Westminster fire office by day and by night,
he was a student at the London School of Art. His career as an artist kicked off in the 1890s.
He's doing some scrap work, as he called it, drawing the great and good of Victorian Society for periodicals like the Pall Mall Budget, the Westminster Gazette.
But it was his wife, the portraitist, Edyth Starkie, who encouraged him to start exhibiting his fantasy art and to pursue his passion for book illustration.
Since the late 1890s, he published many, many books.
He was prolific and unusually for an illustrator he was profitable as well, and he worked right up until his death in 1939 at the age of 72.
So tell me a little bit more about his wife and her encouragement of his work, then,
because that's – so often we find with with authors like this that there's somebody else sort of encouraging, gently nudging.
I'm thinking in particular, you know, we were looking at Tales from Shakespeare earlier.
I'm thinking of the way Charles and Mary Lamb kind of worked worked together.
Yeah. So definitely a collaborative element there. And certainly Rackham was one of the first book illustrators to exhibit his work in galleries.
And that was something that Edyth promoted.
And that actually became something which other artists like Edmund Dulac later took up, so also quite influential in his career.
So she encouraged him to sort of treat it as proper artwork. Exactly.
So, yeah. Oh, very cool. So how does that fit in then to the sort of history of book illustration, book production?
What sort of sea change is he is showing us?
I think Arthur Rackham was so important because he really helped to elevate the status of children's book illustrations to a respected art form.
He was the pre-eminent figure in what's become known as the Golden Age of Book Illustration,
which spans from the late Victorian period up until the outbreak of the First World War.
As we talked about, he'd exhibited his work and he sold the original artwork.
And this in turn generated hype and attracted subscribers as well to his new books.
In terms of books themselves, as we'll have a look,
they had unusually high production values. Rackham believed, and this is something which is quoted in his notes, 'Nothing
less than the best that can be had is good enough for those early impressionable years.' As children's books go,
these are fancy children's books and in fact, they're gift books and were commonly gifted around Christmas time in particular.
So shall we have a look at one? Yes, actually, this is the Ingoldsby Legends.
This is one of his earlier illustrated works and it's a deluxe edition.
And I'm sure you can see it or as we describe it, everything about it in an official and in a tactile sense bespeaks quality.
So if you look at the binding, you can see it's in this very pale, even coloured vellum or treated animal skin.
It's got gilt or gold inlay lettering and illustrations and decorations on the binding.
And even the text block or the the top of the pages is gilded.
And you can see we've got these amazing silk ties which don't always survive on copies, but we're lucky to have one here as well.
And then opening the book, we have decorated and papers with an illustration there.
Paging through, you can see here the limited edition statement. So this says, of the large paper
edition of the Ingoldsby Legends, only five hundred and sixty copies have been printed,
of which five hundred are for sale in England and 50 in America.
This is number four hundred and fifty three and it's signed by the illustrator.
Wow. And then you can see we've got colour illustrations and we've got a piece of tissue guarding it.
And then we've got the title page in colour with a foliate sort of Pre-Raphaelite arts and crafts style border with lots and lots of detail there.
And so they're rather magnificent objects. And the other thing to say in terms of their importance as an art form is that
Rackham was really taking advantage of a new technological innovation in publishing,
which was the three colour printing process.
So you can see here, I hope, that we have an illustration on printed glossy photographic paper that's been pasted or tipped in onto art paper,
which is bound in within the book. So they really stand out as illustrations in their own right that you can identify throughout the book.
And of course, that adds to the production costs, but also to the perceived value of these books as well.
Mm hmm. So what are the Ingoldsby Legends and what kind of books did he tend to illustrate?
Well, the Ingoldsby Legends are a series of stories written by a pseudonymous Ingoldsby author.
And this is kind of typical of the text that Rackham liked to illustrate.
So legends, epics, fairy tales, that's all very common Rackham territory.
And there's really a thread of fantasy that runs throughout everything more or less that Rackham illustrates.
So as well as these, we have English Fairy Tales, Irish Fairy Tales,
Tales of the Brothers Grimm, that's very popular, one that was really instrumental in building his reputation.
You have the more legendary epic texts like Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods.
We have the Morte D'Arthur, or we have an abridged version of it.
He also illustrated some of the literary greats like Shakespeare.
So he illustrated Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare,
which is a compendium for children and also some of the some of the plays, some of the more fantastical ones anyway.
So Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. And he also took on Alice in Wonderland, which is quite a brave artistic decision.
It went out to copyright and he immediately published an illustrated edition in 1907, which wasn't something that received universal critical acclaim.
I think there was a lot of a lot of loyalty towards Tenniel's illustrations, which are seen as definitive.
But now Rackham's illustrations are almost equally highly regarded in their own right.
And that's fascinating. It is brave to take on Alice in Wonderland immediately after Tenniel's just done it because he is quite brilliant.
So how would we describe, then, his style? What's sort of fantastic about it, what makes it suited to fantasy?
I think it's a surprisingly varied style.
I can show you some characteristic Rackhamesque styles, and I guess you could characterise them as a curious mixture of the grotesque and the delicate.
So let me show you Rackham's Comus, which was published in nineteen twenty one.
And hopefully you'll be able to see and we can describe what I mean by that.
So. We just paging through here, you can see the inkiness of them, the grotesque, gnarled, very expressive faces,
the fantastical elements here of the animals wearing human clothes and these very mannered, sinuous trees as well.
And that's contrasted with more aethereal elfin-like figures, I guess, like this one,
for example, which is really quite beautiful, but also has kind of goblin characters in the front.
And you can see from his technique that he's using line drawing, which he was a master of, with a watercolour wash, and he uses quite muted tones.
So a typical Rackhamesque picture would just use dusky mauves, pale blues, russet browns, quite earthy twilight colours.
So that's very typical sort of Rackham illustration.
But I think it would do a disservice to him to just focus on those elements. There's
other variations as well, like these very economical pen and ink line drawings here.
Very few strokes, but very expressive. And paging through.
Then you've got these very atmospheric, almost Nordic forest scenes. Rackham's well known for his trees, and we can look at a few more in a minute.
And the other thing is that Rackham also was a master of silhouette drawing.
And you can see that here. And some of his works, in fact, like his copy of Cinderella, is entirely in silhouette with very occasional colour as well.
So it's quite varied. It's quite interesting.
And here's a brilliant example of one of his trees, his anthropomorphic trees, which is a bit of a Rackham hallmark there with the face.
And I know we've come across some in other texts. I don't know whether you wanted to have a look at those ones as well.
Yes. If we can take a look at our English Fairy Tales animate tree, that would be a delight.
So it seems what seems to me so striking about Rackham's illustrations is that they are so masterfully done with texture.
Everything has such detail. It looks like you can really feel it.
And when we have these sort of gnarled trees and goblin features, that's one sort of particular kind of texture.
When we look at these aethereal fairy features where he's where he's sort of
blurred the watercolour wash, and the figures kind of fade into the background.
That's an entirely different texture. Yeah.
And I think his use of colour is really interesting as well.
I think because he he really understood the possibilities of the photographic reproduction process and he was
at pains to make sure that the images represented truly the colours that he was using as much as possible.
And I think looking at the colours he uses as well,
I wonder whether he deliberately limited his colour palette and used these sorts of desaturated tones
precisely because he knew what could be achieved and what couldn't be achieved with technology at that time.
That's a very particular sensibility, not only to creating an atmosphere in the art, but also sort of to the mechanism of reproducing it.
Yeah, exactly, so it's really good understanding of the book as an object and and the publication process, I think he was quite commercially savvy.
Yeah, and this is a brilliant illustration of the talking tree, because the tree is meant to be sort of animate in the story, right? You know, the little girl,
It's a classic good sister, bad sister story where the good sister escapes from a witch with various treasures and the bad
sister gets eaten or put in an oven or whatever because she's too selfish to ask for help.
But so our good sister is up in the tree blending into the blossoms and the tree is bending over the witch to say,
I haven't seen her, not for seven year. And there's something very expressive about that face sort of bent over the witch, isn't there?
Yeah. I mean, it's as I say, it's a Rackham hallmark, the expressive faces.
And there's something we were talking earlier, there's something quite Entish about them. Tolkien readers, particularly there's an illustration
later on in Comus with a walking tree, which it does make you wonder whether Tolkien was influenced by that.
I think we have to imagine so on some level.
So speaking of inspiration, then, what artists inspired Rackham and who was sort of inspired by him?
What's his place in the kind of history of the way that we interpret these stories?
Well, I can tell you who Rackham cited as his influences. He named William Blake, Charles Keen,
He was a contemporary illustrator. He's been described as a bit of an artist's artist.
He's more obscure than Arthur Rackham, but very highly regarded.
And Rackham was also an admirer of the German renaissance engraver Albrecht Durer, which I think you really see.
You were talking only about the detail and the texture and the pattern. And I think that's really there
in Durer's engravings, and particularly in the monochromatic works that Rackham has
in some of this texts, a lot of that detail is captured.
The other influence which I think is fairly apparent in reckons work is that of other slightly earlier book illustrators.
So we talked about John Tenniel, who illustrated Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but also George Crookshank.
He was also a master of detail and had a caricature style.
And he also did these sort of scrap work sketches for publications and periodicals that were around in the late Victorian period.
And he also illustrated German popular stories and fairy tales as well.
So I'm sure that had a bearing on Rackham's work and his interests. In terms of who he influenced,
I think it would be difficult to identify fantasy artists and children's illustrators who weren't directly or indirectly
influenced by Rackham's work because he was so prolific and he was so popular and influential in that Golden Age
of Illustration which spanned, you know,
a couple of generations really. Those kind of grotesque and inky elements, which are kind of redolent of Mervin Peake, and there's a lot of humour as well,
which I think you see in some later fantasy illustrators, and particularly illustrators of the humorous writers, like Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.
I'm thinking of things like that, and perhaps also a bit of Walt Disney as well in his early films.
You do see it, don't you? Yeah, perhaps a little bit less detail.
But the muted colours of something like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and the very expressive faces, I think owes something to Arthur Rackham.
And yeah, I think very much so. I think you can also sort of very specifically see the simultaneous influence of Durer and Blake at the same time.
Right. This sort of engraver's precision and the fantasist's kind of watercolour wash with these fantastic landscapes.
That's very cool. I also do wonder if we see in some of his sort of hand-drawn illustrations, if we see a little bit of Quentin Blake.
Yes. Yes. You could well be right there. Just a little bit.
They're very, very expressive and they're very economical, kind of graphic, very few pen strokes.
And later on, I'd like to show you some of the hand drawn sketches.
They're inside some extra special Rackham editions. I think maybe you can see elements of Quentin Blake there as well.
Let's see what you think. Absolutely. So now the sort of obvious question,
why does an academic institution like Trinity College have this collection of beautifully illustrated children's books?
It's slightly incongruous, isn't it? And I think that, well, the reason is that they were part of a larger bequest from the Danson family.
So I mentioned we're standing here in our Danson Library. And this is largely filled with books from Lieutenant
Colonel John Raymond Danson, he donated the collection in nineteen seventy six, and his parents and his grandparents as well,
who were marine insurers but also avid book collectors, they put their money to good use.
And it kind of begs the question why the Danson family collected them.
And I think they collected them for two reasons.
One of which was that they were very interested in illustrative works of all kinds across all periods and places,
you know, spanning from heraldic works to herbals.
And in terms of Rackham's contemporaries or his new contemporaries,
we do have books here that were illustrated not just by Arthur Rackham, but by the likes of Aubrey Beardsley, Edmund Dulac and E. H. Shepherd,
who illustrated the Winnie the Pooh books as well.
And what's exciting for us here at Trinity is that we've really only scratched the surface of what we have here in the Danson Library.
We know about the Rackham books because they've been catalogued to antiquarian standards and that's been generously supported by donors.
But much still remains to be discovered. So there's the illustrated side of things.
And the other thing, I guess, is that they're collectable by design.
As I was saying when we looked at the Ingoldsby legends and looking at the deluxe edition,
they have high production values, but they're also incredibly popular. The books are mass-produced in trade editions by big commercial publishers,
some of whom we're still familiar with today, like Macmillan, like Heinneman, Hodder and Stoughton.
And then on top of that, there were variant editions which were then published for the American and European markets.
As a collector, variation is good. And I can show you one of our trade editions, which is
our King Arthur stories, which are edited by Pollard and based on Thomas Malory's novel, Morte D'Arthur.
So this just gives you a sense of what a lot of the trade editions look like,
which is still staggeringly beautiful, they have these amazing gold inlaid illustrations,
which you can see here, but the binding is just a bit more workaday. It's a buchkram binding.
It's less luxurious altogether. The paper is well, this is in pristine condition.
This is a first edition, but it's altogether thinner.
There are illustrations and there are colour illustrations as well. But it's just a more economical way of printing.
And there's just a little bit less of the opulence of the deluxe editions about it.
You can see an illustration of that.
So that's the trade editions of which there were many, many copies which were very profitable and very popular, and these were beautiful enough.
But there was also this pioneering commercial decision to publish small runs of the deluxe editions,
which was for the gift book market, which I mentioned earlier. And these emulate the aesthetics and the feel of the Arts and Crafts Movement, private press books,
really. They don't look like machine made books at all.
And in fact, I think it's a contemporary critic at the Times who said that they were more suited to the drawing room than to the nursery.
I think as a bit of a criticism about the standard of production for things like the Ingoldsby Legends,
which I can just briefly show you again, because perhaps they weren't suitable for children.
But I mean, as we all know, children's books aren't just for children. And I think the Danson family certainly felt that way.
Then later in Rackham's career, we have the addition of extra limited copies, and these are sometimes called Rackham Specials,
and these feature the work of prestigious bookbinders and they have unique hand-drawn sketches which are signed by Rackham.
And this only enhances their appeal to collectors and to children as well.
So I can show you an example of one of the Rackham specials, and this is a copy of Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market.
And I just read it. As you can see, this has a full leather binding.
It's green Morocco, it's got the gold border and it's a fairly slim, attractive, almost nondescript book from the outside.
But you've got this marvellous explosion of colour with the end papers, the marbled end papers.
And just at the bottom of the turn-ins, it's got a description saying bound by Sangorski and Sutcliffe,
you have really prestigious binders, and then if we page through this, the paper is just altogether thicker, very creamy, high quality, high density paper.
And then you've got these marvellous end papers, these pictorial, semi-abstract end papers with goblins.
And this is also designed by Rackham.
So the attention to detail in the artwork that's gone into even things like the end papers before the text starts, this is really quite something.
And here we have one of the hand drawn sketches which are entirely unique to each copy, so the limited edition statement,
here, says this edition is limited to four hundred and ten copies of which 400 copies are for sale.
So these 10 copies weren't initially for sale.
In fact, most of these extra special, extra limited editions were presentation copies for Arthur Rackham to give to family and friends.
So his daughter had some of them, for instance, and this is copy number two.
You can see a rather charming goblin at the Goblin Market. Why wouldn't you want to taste his fruits?
So that's signed by the illustrator.
And again, we've got one of the anthropomorphic trees there as well, and perhaps a touch of Quentin Blake playfulness about it.
Yes, this is what I was thinking of when I when I said Blake,
it's the sort of energy of the line drawing and the sharpness of it, especially in the faces.
But they do they do look friendly, don't they? These goblins at their market, their fruits do look nice.
And such a charming illustration for a children's book,
but also obviously fantastic for collectors as well to have a hold of something that is so unique in books which were so ubiquitous,
really, that were so widely available. That's something that no one else would have.
So, yeah, so they were collectable and they were illustrated.
And that's why the Danson family, I think, collected them.
And I'll just show you quickly the Danson Library book plate, the John Raymond Danson personal book plate, which is a work of art in and of itself.
I don't know whether you can see in any detail here. Just to describe it to you.
As I said, they were maritime insurance average adjusters.
So we've got a merman, possibly Poseidon himself, with his trident, looking back over at the shore while there's a beached fishing boat out to sea.
So that's rather extraordinary. And that actually designed by Stephen Gooden.
And he was another illustrator who was working in the nineteen thirties, a contemporary of Arthur Rackham's as well.
We should all be so lucky to have such end papers in our books.
Yeah. I think maybe the word iconic is overused, but this is perhaps an iconic book plate and rather lovely.
So what on the whole would you say is special about the Trinity collection?
So there are a couple of things which make Trinity's collection particularly exciting to me as the librarian here and also,
I hope, particularly interesting to researchers. So as I mentioned earlier, there are many, many variant editions of Rackham's books.
So our collection here, we have around 40 or so.
It's by no means comprehensive. But I do think it's representative of Rackham's work as a children's book illustrator.
We had some early work like Rip Van Winkle, which was from 1905, right through to the Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham.
And we have a posthumous edition of that published in 1951. So I think it's a great place to start if you want to do comparative work to explore
book illustrations across a number of different literary genres and subgenres.
And of course, if you're a fan of Rackham's work.
The other thing is that the collection is rich in deluxe editions, as we've seen, and on top of that, we have this clutch of Rackham specials.
So it's really possible to appreciate the books as material objects here and get a real sense of the difference between the trade editions,
the deluxe editions and the Rackham specials, as we've seen. And in fact, we're even lucky enough to have two Rackham specials of the same text.
So Christine Rossetti's Goblin Market with this unique illustration...
Allow me to introduce you to Christina Rossetti's
Goblin Market, and I will skip ahead to the limited edition statement and the hand-drawn sketch,
which I hope you can see here, which again, it's playful,
it's expressive, it's colourful, but altogether more menacing than the other hand-
drawn illustration that we've got, of the more benign goblin. Yeah, very different attitudes.
But that's such a versatile style. Yeah, very much so.
And I mean, it's only because in places like institutions like Trinity Library here, and there are
other libraries in the US that hold bigger collections, you can actually make those comparisons because,
of course, in private hands, especially when they were initially given away as presentation copies,
nobody would get to see more than one illustration for the same work.
So that's quite a privilege. That's quite exciting.
Is it possible to compare one of the illustrations inside The Goblin Market with the hand drawn one,
to see the differences in his various styles? Yeah, on page three,
I mean, so this is quite a quite a different style, this one here.
It's lovely. Very pre-Raphaelite, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, very pre-Raphaelite.
Like there are elements that particularly I think in the fairytales and we were looking
earlier at Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods and there are certainly some very,
very pre-Raphaelite Rhine Maidens in there. Quite. Which we'll hopefully have a look at momentarily.
And you have these very beautiful, very neat, brief line drawings that punctuate the text.
Another colour one coming up. These are all lovely, aren't they?
They're charming, charming without being sentimental, necessarily. It's that edge of inky darkness that saves them from being too saccharine.
I couldn't put it better myself. So do you have a favourite item in the collection?
A favourite book, a favourite illustration? Well, that's a dangerous question to ask a librarian, because we don't usually have favourites,
or at least it doesn't stay the same and we don't always have just one.
I have two favourites, actually, if I can show you.
So one of these, and I think this is a text that you will be interested in, is Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination.
And this was quite a late work for Arthur Rackham, it was published in 1935 and he died in 1939.
And another one of our Rackham specials, the super extra limited editions here.
And this one is also bound by some Sangorski and Sutcliffe.
And the tools, the pictorial tools here are also designed by Arthur Rackham, the owl and the bat on the diagonals there,
which is quite a quite beautiful. And I guess the reason I like this one so much is the sheer variety of illustrations.
It's a real feast for the eyes. So prepare yourself. We're looking now at a lovely, blank, creamy paper.
If you turn over, it's a riot. I mean, it's monochromatic, but it is so dazzling.
It's so angular and and the skeletons are so expressive and menacing and perhaps a bit scared.
There's something electrifying about it.
Really. Absolutely. And that looks like a woodcut, but it is ink drawing.
Yeah. This is a pen and ink drawing. But yes, it's very much kind of mimics that, that monochromatic colouring that you see in woodcuts.
And here is another one of Rackham's hand drawn sketches.
And I just love the self-referential element of this and the playfulness of the gremlin scaring the person who's reading and has dropped Poe's tales.
And so perhaps a cautionary message to the reader, not too read it too close to bed time.
And this one, again, is limited. Four hundred and sixty copies were available.
Ten were not for sale. And this is number two again and again, signed by Arthur Rackham.
But it's just glorious. And then if we continue on through the text, you're talking about details.
So much detail. I mean, isn't that great for the body?
And with that horrifying expression on its face. It's a dramatic, isn't it?
And the use of shadow and the etching on it here, the lines, it's so, so violent and vivid.
And at the same time,
there's so much attention to mundane details like the walls and the lines on the wooden floor boards and the rattling chair.
More great creatures. Yes, exactly. And this one looks very different again.
Yeah, it reminds me of illustrators like Crookshank,
who were actually getting their work etched rather than the photographic process in black and white.
Lots of linework here as well. And the expressions, it's extraordinary and it's good fun.
It's just, it's very playful but also terrifying.
And I think that is one of the pleasures of looking at a Rackham illustrated text, is that frisson of excitement and fear
at the same time. You look at the maelstrom there. Quite. Poe would approve of that sort of excitement and terror combined.
Exactly, exactly. These kinds of mediaeval elements.
And the colour illustrations, again, but usually for Rackham, certainly for his later work, is very monochromatic.
I think that adds to the drama. Here's here's Hop-frog, one of the more terrifying characters in the Poe canon.
They're just extraordinary, and the movement in them.
They really tell a story. And I think Rackham understood his text so well that he was never slavish in his interpretations of them.
He was never confined to very literal interpretations. The use of shadow there and silhouette
is something that Rackham returns to here.
Yeah. I mean, as good a representation of The Pit and the Pendulum as any I've ever seen.
Exactly. So, I mean, we could go on. So that's one of them.
But I will switch back to John Milton's Comus and this one, I just find such an interesting choice.
I mean, he has illustrated Shakespeare, but this is a courtly masque,
a mid 17th century dramatic performance intended for a very small coterie of viewers.
It's about chastity, slightly unusual, and quite different thematically to many of the texts. But I love the variety in here.
And I also just wanted to show you this illustration in particular because it really epitomises Arthur Rackham's playfulness and inventiveness.
So if you look at the the protective guard sheet in front of the illustration,
which have these very handy captions, it says: 'and so they, so perfect in their misery,
not once perceive their foul disfigurement, but boast themselves more comely than before.'
So they've drunk a malign magic potion, which turns them all into beasts.
And we look at the illustration is just – oh, wow – it's just so witty.
There's a wonderful juxtaposition between these fantastical hybrid human animals and some of them are
more suggestive than literal, the woman in the foreground has these very snake like eyes.
But then you have just a goat's head and it's comical.
I mean, they're looking at themselves in the mirror and they can't recognise their own disfigurement.
But it's also inventive because it's that mix of the fantastical and the realistic and the detailed.
It's an illustration of the fiction of people morphing into animals.
But it's also a play on the kind of. Dutch Golden Age painters with very realistic still lives, and you've got there the wildfowl,
theee the sort of hunting trophies and that's not in the text at all.
And it becomes quite layered and sort of animals hunting animals.
And it doesn't have to be there. But it is.
And I think that really does speak to Arthur Rackham's ethos.
And he explained this to other illustrators and said the role of the illustrator is not to
make up for any shortcomings in the text of the author or to clarify anything that isn't clear.
It's there to add to it. And this is an example of Arthur Rackham taking an idea and running with it.
So I really wanted to share that with you. Yeah, and adding the sort of bloody aspect that the text kind of implies, dances around,
gestures toward the danger, and he literalizes it in the image.
That's fantastic. Now, do you have a favourite I know you've looked at a few of them, would you like to go to page through one?
Absolutely. So I grew up with an illustrated Arthur Rackham fairy tales book, and the images have really stayed with me.
But one of the books with a style that just is fascinating for historians of fantasy is his interpretation of Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods.
So we can maybe take a look at that, because this is an illustrated version of Wagner's text.
And the text was hugely inspirational to a lot of the sort of great Oxford fantasy authors.
C.S. Lewis famously said that this is the sort of thing that gave him a whiff of pure northernness, whatever that means.
But Tolkien was very interested also in Wagner's use of myth.
It informed the way that he
shaped Middle Earth. And obviously there are sort of attendant complications to looking at a Wagner text in this day and age
and looking at the way that Rackham interprets these characters as sort of terribly blonde and Nordic.
But he's looking to sort of create an atmosphere that also really spills
over into his fairy tale illustrations that I think is worth considering.
And so I think if we sort of take a look at this first illustration.
This is this is our Smith, Mime in the in the German, who is going to be raising our hero,
Siegfried, and encouraging him to slay a dragon very shortly.
But you can see here the same sort of stuff that we get in Rackham's fairy tale illustrations, a real sense of texture,
of light and dark and the sort of glowing blade with that muted red brush sort of draws the eye immediately.
He's going for atmosphere and he's going for this sort of pseudo mediaeval atmosphere.
He's trying to sort of imagine this this idealised past in an interesting way, because it's also -
It's not very clean, is it? It's a bit grim in there, pun intended, and he doesn't shy away from that either.
I wonder if potentially also we could take a look at the Rhine maidens,
which is a hugely famous illustration that gets a lot of attention, if I can find it correctly.
This is also a great one here we have.
Two of our dwarf smiths over the body of the dead dragon who is here interpreted as very snakelike, especially in the in the head area here,
which is perhaps more in line with the Norse version of the text where our word for dragon has a huge semantic range.
But if we sort of skip forward to see Siegfried
speaking to the Rhine maidens. Here he is first with Brunhilde.
As we can see, they're very blonde, perhaps, perhaps too blonde, you know, there is an aspect to this kind of mythmaking that is,
that projects back into the past a sort of idealisation that can be used in very negative ways,
and so we want to be conscious and careful of approaching these texts and these illustrations
and sort of considering, what are the implicit values being projected in a picture like that?
What does it mean? Why illustrate them that way? Sort of confronting it critically in so far as we can.
If we continue paging through, can see he's got the whole text printed out.
Here's another Brunhilde kissing the cursed ring from the from the hoard of gold that Siegfried recovered from Fafner, the dead dragon.
The ring is going to be trouble. Spoiler alert for Wagner's Ring Cycle.
But again, the level of detail is incredible and especially in the attention paid to the tree, I think as well is sounding very Rackhamesque.
If we sort of zip through the rest of our Nordic landscapes.
Here we have a Rhine maiden confronting Brunhilde about the ring, and there's a real,
again, sense of motion and dynamism in this one, it's very dramatic.
He's looking sort of very intentionally at the kind of movement forward in a way, which I think is is lovely purely from an artistic standpoint.
If we go a little bit further,
You should be at the Rhine maidens soon. Something which struck me looking at this text,
I think we often associate Wagner with quite an investment in time, like these epic stories, and something that you get from a Rackham
book is almost an abridged version by flicking through to these pages with the tipped-in photographs in the paper,
with the captions in front of them. You can almost see the key milestones, if you like, in the story.
And he's giving you a plot summary in a way. You could you could look through these and and sort of get the kind of highlights of the narrative.
So here is Siegfried with the Rhine maidens. They are encouraging.
They look very sort of siren-like. In the Ring Cycle
They are deeply invested in the return of the cursed gold to the to the river, to their own possession.
But it looks here a little bit like they're trying to get Siegfried himself to enter the river.
They're intentionally sort of done in this seductive way.
And you were saying earlier that, you made a comparison to Aubrey Beardsley.
And I think we can safely say that a lot of illustrators of this period love the femme fatale.
The Pre-Raphaelites also love the femme fatale. Very interested in this idea of the woman whose beauty is dangerous.
Right. That conceals poison. La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
Precisely. And I think this is just a very sort of overt realisation of that trope.
And again, with the muted colours and the sort of carefully done textures,
the contrast between the sort of lazy lines of the water and the very precise lines
of Siegfried's sort of invented pseudo mediaeval armour is very striking visually.
And I'm looking at this book, one thing that strikes me is something we've been talking about children's illustrations,
but I wonder if this is a text that's that's more for the adult Danson collectors rather than children.
I might be presupposing what Edwardian children are reading. I sort of hope it wasn't Wagner that they were reading.
I would feel very bad for them if they were reading Wagner. Well that's wonderful. Thank you so much for letting me show you some of the items in our collection and hopefully if any researchers are watching this and are interested in exploring more they can get in touch. Come and pay us a visit. Thank you for having us, this has been such an exciting virtual tour of this collection. And wonderful to know also that it's available for consultation.