Josef Madlener was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 artist and illustrator. He was born near Memmingen

Memmingen

Memmingen is a town in the Bavarian administrative region of Swabia in Germany. It is the central economic, educational and administrative centre in the Danube-Iller region. To the west the town is flanked by the Iller, the river that marks the Baden-Württemberg border...

, Swabia

Swabia

Swabia is a cultural, historic and linguistic region in southwestern Germany.-Geography:Like many cultural regions of Europe, Swabia's borders are not clearly defined...

. His work was published in various newspapers, magazines, and a few children's Christmas books, e. g. Das Christkind Kommt (1929) and Das Buch vom Christkind (1938). Madlener's Christmas art also appeared in several postcard

Postcard

A postcard or post card is a rectangular piece of thick paper or thin cardboard intended for writing and mailing without an envelope....

 series. The monograph by Eduard Raps (1981) published for the artist's centenary, shows a sampling of Madlener's art.

The most famous of Madlener's paintings is "Der Berggeist" ("the mountain spirit"), from similarities in style dated to the period around 1925–30. The painting is reproduced on a postcard

Postcard

A postcard or post card is a rectangular piece of thick paper or thin cardboard intended for writing and mailing without an envelope....

 that was in the possession of J. R. R. Tolkien

J. R. R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...

, marked "the origin of Gandalf

Gandalf

Gandalf is a character in J. R. R. Tolkien's novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In these stories, Gandalf appears as a wizard, member and later the head of the order known as the Istari, as well as leader of the Fellowship of the Ring and the army of the West...

".
Zimmermann (1983:22) interviewed the Madlener's daughter Julie (born 1910), who distinctly remembered her father painting Der Berggeist sometime after 1925/6. She also noted that the postcard version was "published in the late twenties by Ackermann Verlag München, in a folder with three or four similar pictures with motifs drawn from German mythology: a fairy lady of the woods, a deer carrying a shining cross between its antlers, 'Rübezahl

Rübezahl

Rübezahl is a folklore mountain spirit of the Giant Mountains , a mountain range along the border between the historical lands Bohemia and Silesia. He is the subject of many legends and fairy tales in German folklore.-Name:The origin of the name is not clear...

', and possibly one more".
The whereabouts of the original was unknown for some sixty years, until it was auctioned on Sotheby's

Sotheby's

Sotheby's is the world's fourth oldest auction house in continuous operation.-History:The oldest auction house in operation is the Stockholms Auktionsverk founded in 1674, the second oldest is Göteborgs Auktionsverk founded in 1681 and third oldest being founded in 1731, all Swedish...

 in July, 2005, and sold for 84,000 GBP http://search.sothebys.com/jsps/live/lot/LotDetail.jsp?&lot_id=4GHDR.

The previous owner had met Madlener twice and described Madlener as being tall, about 185 cm. He recalled that Madlener liked to bake and, on his second visit in 1946 or 1947 served his own bread and much coffee. Having seen Der Berggeist on his previous visit, the visitor told the artist how much he loved it, and Madlener promptly told his guest to give it a good home.

Literature

• Eduard Raps Josef Madlener 1881 bis 1967, Memmingen, 1981.
• Manfred Zimmermann, The Origin of Gandalf and Josef Madlener, Mythlore
  Mythlore
  Mythlore is a semi-annual peer-reviewed journal published by the Mythopoeic Society. Although it publishes articles that explore the genres of myth and fantasy in general,...
  
  34, 1983.
• Hans-Wolfgang Bayer and Johannes Hoyer, "Der Nachlaß des Memminger Künstlers Josef Madlener" in: Schönere Heimat 87 (1998), 66–70.