Illustrations for Die Ringe der Macht (The Rings of Power) by Helmut W. Pesch & Horst von Allwörden, 1997

The novel was published in paperback by Bastei Lübbe paperback in 1997, and it is exactly what its title suggests: A deep bow to Tolkien.
 
When I read the first 100 pages of of the manuscript back then I was slightly irritated by by the extent of references to The Fellowship of the Ring, but once I had accepted the whole thing as a deliberate pastiche, and since the novel later on develops in quite another direction, my irritation abated. The authors know exactly what they do, especially Helmut W. Pesch, whose doctoral dissertation “Fantasy – Theory and History of a Literary Genre” from 1981 is the German standard reference book on the subject. Since I had read the study years ago, I was all the more glad when Bastei commissioned the illustrations for the novel.
 
The sequel Die Herren der Zeit (The Lords of Time) was published in 2000.