Galina
Miklinova

The Tales of Beedle the Bard

For forty years Zwerger has been illustrating the childrens’ classics (such as Grimm and Andersen) that she grew up with.

When she was approached to draw illustrations for The Tales of Beedle the Bard, she wasn’t very sure what they were.

‘Beedle’s tales were new to me (I guess that immediately exposes me as a Muggle!), but no less classic in feel and impact. And this very newness – the humour and pathos of J.K. Rowling’s imagination – gave me wonderful material to work with, not tied to longstanding pictures in my head from the tales of my youth. The time I’ve spent with this book has probably been the happiest and most exciting months of my life, working in a blaze of imagery, inspired by Rowling and her rich, evocative storytelling.

Lisbeth Zwerger talked a lot about how the drawings for the five fairy tales came about. She described how Rowling’s agency paid close attention to ensuring that all the illustrations were consistent with the existing Harry Potter universe, that no details were inserted incorrectly and that the images matched the fans’ ideas. This was certainly not always easy for the renowned illustrator, whose drawing style is characterized by clear lines and a minimum of details. Nevertheless, she managed wonderfully to transform the fairy tales of Beedle the Bard into images that now decorate the German edition. Her images are both supple and resistant, whether she depicts individual figures or objects or creates large panoramas, and when she overrides the laws of nature and - based on a half-sentence in Rowling’s work - brings the escaped donkey back through the air, then magic is not claimed, but rather exercised with a light touch. 

A work of art in its own right: this is especially true of the grim story about the three brothers who encounter Death himself and are given gifts by him, which plunges two of them into misfortune and gives the third, the cleverest of them, a long, happy life until he then faces death himself. Zwerger’s pictures make the tragedy and the happiness equally clear, but the tragedy is just as far from absolute as the happiness, so that the most beautiful panorama in the volume is the empty landscape in the middle of which the almost transparent Death stands and waits - of course, he knows that the last brother will not escape him, but for the moment his attitude even radiates a certain helplessness, as if he had never encountered such a thing before. That is probably true.

Zwerger’s pictures not only complement the text, they interpret it with the greatest freedom and ennoble it by using it as the basis for a work of art in its own right.