Who is on the cover of the Silmarillion

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

CT has no input into the Ballantine/Del Ray covers, any more than his father did (remember JRRT's shock and horror at the Remington LR covers?).

Neither the cover reproduction I found (at http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403181958l/7347.jpg) nor anything published previously in this forum indicates that this cover was from a Ballantine edition. It was only marked on a website as “Second Edition Cover”. This suggested to me, perhaps wrongly, that this illustration was originally from the dustcover of the hardcover second edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers in 1999. The illustration might then have been reprinted as cover art on the paperback edition by Del Rey books, since Del Rey had American paperback rights to previous versions of The Silmarillion. Or the website may have been somewhat imprecise (to the point of being wrong) and referred only to the first Del Rey/Ballantine second edition.

See http://www.planet-tolkien.com/board/...arillion-cover for a fan discussion of what I think to be the same illustration, with the same lack of conclusions to the discussion as in this forum.

For artistic screw-ups, see this interview with Barbara Remington about how she came to illustrate the covers to the original Ballantine paperback editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings without even reading the books: http://www.tolkienguide.com/modules/...Brem+Interview , not her usual practice.