It is part of, at least in my opinion, human nature, to create images based on the things that are described to us, things that we do not see, but are told of, or read about. Many things, predominantly in our own past, must be imagined to some degree, which is why movies are made and books written from a standpoint describing a past era. A lot of people find modernity in literature or cinema to be intensely drab, weak, and needless, unless the plot and characters really work. Society, nowadays, is part of a more cinematic culture, where we have the pictures drawn for us, but those pictures are still pictures, mostly pictures of people portraying actual people (actual = fiction and/or nonfiction; simply real). Documentaries, film archives, a journals are first-hand accounts (though journals still require pictures to be drawn by the reader), but few a great tool for escapism, if you want to call it escapism, as subversive as that may be, is the imagining, and inner painting of pictures.
Which brings me to Tolkien – and my point.
Ever since The Hobbit was first written, people, including the Professor himself, have been drawing, sketching, painting, and, in short, imagining Tolkien. Just because his non-posthumously published works are very descriptive, leaving little room for expansion in some sections, they will always be open to imaginative interpretation. That imaginative interpretation sparked an epic cinematic trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, a pair of intriguing, if mildly disconcerting animated films by Ralph Bakshi and Rankin-Bass, a surprisingly large MUSH Online Role-Playing Game called “Elendor”, a more tangible RPG produced by Iron Crown Enterprises, countless websites, a plethora of fanfiction, pictures, paintings, photos, murals, posters, crafts, action figures, toys, board game, computer games, and a rather funnily-illustrated calendar drawn by Greg and Tim Hildebrant.
But, is anything, any single, solitary one of these things, up to and including the author himself
right?
I consider myself a bit of a ‘literati’ in terms of a recent thread, well-versed in the books of our species, both the greater and the worse. I am obviously not of the right mind about everything, for there are some works which are praised as divine which I despise (I won’t say which, I don’t need more enemies). I’ve seen a lot, I’ve read a lot. I am not yet an old man, nor am I a young one, nor am I middle-aged (I’m beginning to wonder what I am, really), but I’ve seen stuff, to put it simply, and I’ve heard stuff from others, and imbibed a lotta stuff indeed, and, as you all know, I’ve religiously read Tolkien for some time. I have images floating about in my head, images of grand towers and castles and battles and orcs. I’ve based those images on what I know of Tolkien, and of the world. As an important note: my vision of Tolkien has been shaped by my vision of life, by my perception of reality. If Tolkien was translated somehow into that crude non-inflected tongue that I spoke before I was a month old, and the books drilled into me, I would view the world differently, from a Tolkien perception. This sounds like an interesting premise, but a ridiculous one, nonetheless. Viewing the world through the eyes of someone whose reality, and system of creating images, was formed by images of Middle-Earth, would make the real world a bit of a bore, as well as frightening, mundane, and many other things.
I love Tolkien, but I may still be putting too much thought into this. Either way, thinking about this is addictive, because of the many branches that stem from the trunk of that simple, single idea, that of depiction, of representation, and of a optical view, through the ‘mind’s eye’ of Tolkien’s fantastic world. I hope I’m not confusing you here, because I know I’m confusing myself.
It sounds, as you read through this drabble I’ve written, as if I’m simply philosophizing, rather stupidly, to myself. If this thought has occurred to you, than you’re very perceptive, and also right. I am philosophizing aloud, which is useless to you, the reader, but give me a little room to expand the question, with background information. If you ponder the above, you may have a better time answering the below.
What do you see, really? What did you see in Tolkien? What do you see now? I understand that there have been threads in the past debating what images should be used to represent Tolkien. The Professor has upwards of 50 sketches published for us to see, and those should be “definitive,” should they not? If an author draws pictures of his own books, those pictures are canon, right? Those
images are canon, right? They are not to be toyed with, not to be denied, not to be challenged, right?
Wrong.
Well, maybe.
Even the author cannot depict the reader’s thoughts, or what the reader sees. When I was the reader, nestled into a beige-velour armchair with blinking table lamp at my side, I began to read, and I wasn’t in a beige-velour armchair with blinking table lamp at my side anymore. It is my guess that you were removed from your seat, or bed, or couch, or wherever on Earth you were to, and I bet that even those who don’t like Tolkien probably found themselves somewhere else, perhaps not a great place if they got such a negative impression. As I said, our perception of fantasy is reality expanded, but it must begin somewhere. Countless enterprises have capitalized on the ‘reality’ that is their version of Tolkien. John Howe, the artist whose work was used as a design basis for the films, was affected by his views of Mediaeval Europe, and the movie reflected that. Tim and Greg Hildebrant purloined some creative techniques from Disney when designing Rivendell, and I don’t think I want to know what Ralph Bakshi was thinking, even though I did rather fancy the Bakshi version of the Goblin Song in Gundabad (you know, the one with all the “ho ho”-ing?). Tolkien wrote about dragons, but dragons aren’t his creations. So, we think of the dragons from the stories of St. George, Apsu and Tiamat, and those tales of Knights and fearsome beasts. From what we’ve gleaned from Tolkien, the Witch-King of Angmar doesn’t have a visible head, just a crown hovering in mid-air above mantled shoulders, but an overtly stereotypical image of deathly things (i.e. the Grim Reaper, Death, other soul-sucking fiends) has given the Witch-King different depictions in almost every picture, even if those differences are very very subtle. What did you see? Did you see what I saw: the Invisible Man in a Greco-Roman suit of black armor with a spiky crown hanging precariously on a nonexistent head? Or did you see what John Howe saw, what Tim and Greg Hildebrant saw, what Ralph Bakshi saw?
Just to make the thread interesting, and avoid asking a repetitive question, let me pose more questions. More than just
what you saw,
where did you see from? I know I’m a third-person person, but I know some people who see stories from the point of view of a protagonist, or even an antagonist. Tolkien encourages us, in
The Fellowship, to look at the Fellowship from a fox’s point of view, and, in
The Return of the King, slips into Pippin several time, and Sam to, as well as a number of others. Did you taste, smell, feel Middle-Earth? Was it cold, warm, temperate, amphibious? Was there someone there you knew? Perhaps you, like me, saw some reflections of the real world in the characters, or in the places (even after the movie, and with Tolkien’s guidelines, I have not been able to shake the image of Minas Tirith as Austria’s Neuschwanstein Castle). What was there?
What, for you, was Middle-Earth?
And, did you think that what was there for you was right?
And, if it wasn't, what is?
P.S. I think this is deluged [and deluded] enough not to be redundant. But, just in case, here's this handy little Copyright Clause
