My name's Alan Lee, illustrator of Tolkien and myths and legends from
different times and worlds. And this is my new book. It's The Hobbit
Sketchbook. I'd illustrated The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and worked on the
films of both of those stories. And alongside all of that work, all the
work involved in illustrating books, there's a kind of parallel amount of work going on
which is just exploring, doodling and producing endless roughs and
variations that normally don't see the light of day. And this is an opportunity
to put a lot of that background material into a book. So this contains drawing
that I did when I was working on the book and working on the film and quite a
lot of new drawings and drawings done in different periods all in one volume.
It's the kind of companion volume to The Lord of the Rings Sketchbook.
I'm here at Waterstones Piccadilly and I've been asked to show you three books which
have inspired me and the first of these is The Mabinogion. And I was loaned
a copy of this by a friend who's at Oxford and he was he was studying
English, the history of English literature, and as part of that he was
forced to read The Mabinogion. And I read this and I thought my god you can go
to college and read this kind of wonderful material. It's 11 medieval
tales which go from the period of the gods of the early Britons in Wales
and through to medieval Arthurian stories.
So they're transcriptions of what would have been an oral tradition into
into written form and there's eleven stories. The first of four of them are
called the four branches of The Mabinogion.
And they concerned stories of the gods of Bran, Branwen, Manawyddan, Pryderi.
And then there are three extraordinary tales called the native British
tales. For example Culhwch and Olwen is an extraordinary story which is
probably one of the best, most kind of dramatic and strange and adventurous
stories that I know. And the last three are three Arthurian stories and I'd
highly recommend it. And my second book, it's probably my other favorite trilogy
apart from The Lord the Rings. It's the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake.
And I read this at, well it was about 19 or 20 when I discovered this. And it's
the most brilliant story of this child that's born into this inheritance
essentially. He's Titus Groan, son of Lord Groan and due to inherit the realm
of Gormenghast which is this immense castle which we never kind of get to the
end of it. It's sort of explored throughout the books and it seems to
kind of grow and become this whole world with extraordinary characters like Flay
the butler, Swelter the cook, Prunesquallor, Barquentine and Lord Groan
and Steerpike who enters this world and sort of disrupts it and causes its
downfall. But it's written with such verve and such colour and if I had to
take one book away with me to a desert island, I think it would be this one.
And my final book is Labyrinths by Jorge Louis Borges.
And this is one of the most extraordinary books that I've ever read.
It's a book of short stories which deal with endless libraries, labyrinths,
magical occurrences, crimes. Written by this Argentinean master of the
short story. And it's the kind of book that you read and you keep on
dreaming about. It keeps on kind of ... it enters the unconscious in a way.
And so if I ever want to really kind of have a little trip into somebody else's
extraordinary mind I'll read one of these stories and I highly recommend this book.