So long, Pauline Baynes

The Eerdmans August newsletter reports:

Children’s book illustrator Pauline Baynes passed away on August 1, 2008, at the age of 85. Baynes drew the original line illustrations for J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Her portrayals of Middle-earth and Narnia helped transform the books into towering classics which, in 2000, were voted Book of the Millennium and Children’s Book of the Millennium respectively by the Library Association in Great Britain. Baynes was also awarded a Kate Greenaway Medal for the Dictionary of Chivalry.

I first encountered Pauline Baynes when I first noticed the Narnia Chronicles sitting on Pastor Wine's (yes, funny name for a Baptist, but Stewart Wine is a funny guy) desk in the study of our wonderfully creepy nineteenth-century English church building - a great setting for an introduction to Ms. Baynes. Her work possesses a style that struck me as peculiar even as a third-grader - otherworldly, yet quite welcoming; playful, yet most serious (not unlike the effect of medieval art). Perhaps I'm making too much weather out of her work. Regardless, her illustrations are infinitely superior to the melodramatic teen-romance schlock, completely lacking in mythic quality, that currently disgrace the covers of Lewis' classic series.

Read Baynes' obituaries in The Guardian, The Independent, and The Telegraph. You can spy samples of her classic work at the Tolkien Library. I wonder if Ms. Baynes may have provided some inspiration for Tolkien's exultant short story "Leaf by Niggle."

EXTRA: Be sure to check out Brian Sibley's post on Pauline Baynes, complete with cool photo.

Goodbye Solzhenitsyn

A hero fell today: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, prophetic scourge of the late Soviet Empire (and, in many ways, of the waning American Empire), died today at the age of 89. He burst upon the international literary scene in 1962 with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a book about life in the Siberian gulag. I read it years ago, but as I recall, it's a strangely optimistic book in the sense that grace, brotherhood, and love of life thrive even amidst horrible political oppression. It's also one of the few (only?) classics of 20th-century literature that portrays a Baptist in a positive light.

After publishing One Day in the Life in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn defected to the United States and exposed the horrific conditions behind the Iron Curtain. Though it's hard to believe today, many Western intellectuals embraced the Soviet experiment even up to that time. However, Solzhenitsyn's courage to tell the truth of the ill-fated Russian communist experiment played a key role in the thaw of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union.

Be sure to read his 1978 Harvard address. Also check out the Solzhenitsyn Reader. And here is a lengthy eulogy from the New York Times.

(I received the news via telephone from Tokyo - thanks for the tip, Josh.)