Limiting potential imagination

[zb]

Maybe I'm odd, but I don't have mental pictures of the books at all. If I were to read and concentrate on the character descriptions, I guess I could conciously make a picture in my mind, but when I'm reading, things tend to be shadowy, and I like it that way. I like the fact that I (in my lack of visual imagination) can't tell you what the heck "fair yet grim" looks like, or how it is that Gandalf and Aragorn manage the looking-taller-and younger looking-shorter-and-older trick. Until the movies, I couldn't even tell you what "one voice and terrible" sounded like, I could only tell you that the construction of that phrase gave me goosebumps and I'm sure the real thing sounded cool. (It did!)

So what I regret about having seen the movies is that I now have pictures of various places - which are excellent pictures, I might add, but still pictures. And I am most annoyed at the occasions when PJ tried to actually show things Tolkien said which I'd never have taken literally - think: Gandalf's "conjurer of cheap tricks" line; Bilbo's sudden Gollum transformation; Galadriel's radioactivity. (He seemed to get over this tendency after FotR, thankfully.)