Denmark: when Queen Margrethe II illustrated The Lord of the Rings

It is October 7, 1977. Four years after the death of J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of the very famous Lord of the Rings trilogy, a Danish translation of the work appears in Copenhagen. Edition of only one thousand five hundred copies, it is intended for lovers of beautiful books. In addition to the text, eighty plates and illustration motifs in Art Nouveau style are added. The drawings do not lack originality and have the particularity of not giving the characters any faces. The artist left only a mysterious Viking-sounding signature: Ingahild Grathmer.

The secret quickly gets out. The mysterious designer is none other than... the Queen of Denmark herself, Margrethe II! A great admirer of the English writer, the sovereign had encoded her true identity thanks to this pseudonym of “Grathmer”, the anagram of “Margrethe” and “Ingahild”, a summary of her three other first names, Ingrid, Alexandrine and Thorhildur. In Denmark, the 1500 copies are snapped up and sold out in a few hours. Margrethe II, who recently abdicated after 52 years of reign in favor of her son Frederik, did indeed illustrate the Danish version of The Lord of the Rings.

Also read: Vincent Ferré: “For Tolkien, Middle-earth is our Earth”

This is not the best known facet of the character. The story is not without its charms, however, and begins in England, where the woman who is still only a Danish princess followed Professor Tolkien's courses in medieval literature. A fervent reader of the fantasy epic published in the mid-1950s, she corresponded with him on his return to Denmark. In 1970, two years before acceding to the throne, she sent him, signed with her pseudonym, illustrative drawings inspired by reading these pages. Tolkien, who wanted each reader to imagine the world he had invented, did not want his work to be illustrated.

“Nevertheless, the author kept the drawings by the unknown artist, because, upon his death in 1973, two of Grathmer's ink sketches were found in his coat pocket, while the rest appeared during of an examination of the succession, several even with Tolkien's warm recommendations noted on the sheets,” says the Danish crown website. Tolkien would indeed have been seduced by the drawings, which preserved the readers' imagination by not representing faces. In a draft reply to the Danish princess, Tolkien wrote of these illustrations: “Sometimes I am struck by the resemblance between them and my own (unpublished) attempts; but more often – their unexpected character, as if the history and landscapes were real in themselves but seen from another point of view.”

The true identity of the designer was only revealed at the time of the Danish publication in 1977. Later, other editions would include the drawings of the sovereign. Subsequently, the Queen even authorized the Danish group The Tolkien Ensemble to use her drawings to illustrate the cover of their album.