Is all the "magic" gone?

[Bêthberry]

Wow! This thread is hopping!

But, even if we were to film the books ourselves with unlimited resources so that it matched our own visualisation in every respect (and the films certainly lived up to my own visualisation in very many respects), I am still not sure that the feeling would be the same when we watched it back. And that, I think, is because the "enchantment" arises when we use our imaginations as we read (the "progenitive" process as Tolkien put it). So the visualisation of the books can never hold the same enchantment for us as the books themselves. Mr. SaucepanMan

Interesting indeed. This idea from Tolkien that literature is more "progenitive', ie, stimulates the mind more, seems to support Eomer of the Rohirrim's point that no human actress-no actual representation--could be as successful as the image we create in our own mind from reading.

I'm not completely sold on this idea. It seems to me to be a little too close to the old idea that visual representations are inferior and even suspect. (I'm thinking of how the Puritans, for instance, banned drama and limited pictorial representations in their churches, a very different culture from that Tolkien knew in his Catholic churches.) I wonder what a visual artist would say to this idea that art restricts imagination.

But despite this argument, is it not interesting that Tolkien seems to have inspired a great many visual artists to attempt to depict his vision? Off the top of my head I cannot think of any other fantasy writer who has inspired so many artists. The names are legion; there are 207 artists represented on
Torania's Tolkien page , alone. It seems to me that there is some very compelling, very strong impetus in Tolkien's writing that leads people on to create images of Middle-earth.
Of course, this could be more evidence in support of SpM's point that literature inspires the imagination more than visual representations. Maybe we should see the movies as the latest in a long line of attempts at visual recreations of the printed page.