Review: A Bestiary of Tolkien - A Coloring Book

One of the things I'd like to do on this blog is review Lord of the Rings and Hobbit collectibles, books, films, and games. So hopefully this will be the first of many reviews. I picked up A Bestiary of Tolkien - A Coloring Book about a year ago, but for a long time it sat on my shelf, waiting for me to get some free time to crack it open and start coloring. Fair warning: I am by no means a coloring book aficionado, so I'll be approaching this review as a Tolkien fan first and foremost. Jump past the break to read on.

I first picked this up at a Barnes and Noble because the cover really caught my eye, even half-hidden among a bunch of other Tolkien books. Before purchasing this book, I'd had very little experience with adult coloring books, so I was immediately impressed with the quality of the cover and the book binding. The image to the left showcases the cover well, but doesn't really get across that the large lettering of the title and parts of flame that Smaug are printed in reflective gold. All in all, it's a very attractive book that makes a great-looking addition to my growing Tolkien library.

The book is printed by Thunder Bay Press, and the art by Mauro Mazzara and Andrea Piparo. In general, the art is very well done, though I tended to prefer the images done by Mazzara. I quick Google search shows that has done (or is doing) art for several other Tolkien-related books (for example: The Heroes of Tolkien). I have to say that my favorite thing about the line art in the book is that it reminds my of the art style in the Rankin and Bass Hobbit and Return of the King films that I grew up with, and really love. In fact, one of the things I love about the book is that the line art is so good, it's fun to just look through the book even if you haven't colored any of the pictures yet.

The book bills itself as a bestiary, and it definitely delivers on that promise. The usual Tolkien culprits are included, from orcs and uruk-hai to the Black Riders and Balrogs. But in addition to these familiar "beasts", there are much more arcane creatures like  like Mewlips and Turtle-Fish, which come from some of Tolkien's lesser-known works like The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. There does tend to be a bit of repetition––there are six different images of orcs, and at least two different pictures of wargs. On the one hand, this repetition is great, since you get multiple images of iconic creatures, but on the other hand, I was left wondering what other Tolkien creatures might have been included. Also, a few creatures were included (boars, flies, bats) that are pretty mundane, and don't really add anything to the book.

My only other criticism of the book is that each image is labeled with the pictured creature's name in English and Elvish. It's unclear whether the elven name is supposed to be in Sindarin or Quenya, and even though I am no expert on Elvish, I have to say that some of the translations seem suspect or just unnecessary. For example, the the book contains pictures of Shelob and the Mirkwood spiders. Shelob is translated as "spider", while the picture that is clearly showing the Mirkwood spiders is given the Elvish name "Ungoliant", which is incorrect. Additionally, the word orc is translated variously as "yrch", "snaga", and "uruk". Yrk and Uruk might technically be correct, but I'm not sure where they pulled snaga from. To make matters worse, not all of the pictures are given Elvish translations, and instead are just given (sometimes strange) subtitles. There is an image of a pretty generic-looking human which is given the double title "Hill-men/Pre-Numenoreans", which again, might be technically correct, but just seems weird. I will say, that despite my complaints about the titling, the text is quite small and generally does not detract from the image.

So how was the coloring? Fun. Each image provides plenty of opportunities to color either entire pages or to focus on individual characters. Personally, I've enjoyed picking out one or two characters on several of the pictures, rather than coloring an entire picture (although, that's mainly because I need to expand my collection of colored pencils before I tackle anything too big). I've especially had fun coloring some of the orc characters, which are delightfully non-human looking (unlike in the LOTR and Hobbit films). Below is one of my amateur coloring attempts, done one over a rainy Sunday afternoon:

The pictures are certainly fun to color, but I have to admit that my favorite thing about this book has been sharing it with my son, who I'm just introducing to Middle-earth. We've been reading the Hobbit together at bedtime, and he has had a blast looking at and coloring the pictures in this book. Anything that allows me to spend time with my boy doing Middle-earth stuff earns high praise from me. Here's my son's warg (named Redpaw, if you're wondering):

All in all, I'd give A Tolkien Bestiary: A Coloring Book four stars out of five for providing a beautiful product that is a lot of fun to either just page through, or to color, and only has minor weirdness associated with their "Elvish" translations. I'd recommend this to any Tolkien book collector or art enthusiast.

Later.