Quote:
The radical distinction between all art (including drama) that offers a
visible presentation and true literature is that it imposes one visible form. Literature works from mind to mind and is thus more progenitive. It is at once more universal and more poignantly particular. If it speaks of bread or wine or stone or tree, it appeals to the whole ofthese things, to their ideas; yet each hearer will give to them a peculiar personal embodimentin his imagination. Should the story say “he ate bread,” the dramatic producer or painter canonly show ”a piece of bread” according to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story willthink of bread in general and picture it in some form of his own. If a story says “he climbed a
hill and saw a river in the valley below,” the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his ownvision of such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it willbe made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but especially out of TheHill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word.Tolkien: On Fairy Stories
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This is the whole point, for me - the reader as 'co-creator' of the story, & this is the difference between drama & literature. Drama, whether on stage or film, is given to the viewer - the look, the sounds, the words & their pronunciation - the viewer is effectively a passive observer with no control or input into the experience. Literature on the other hand is a participatory event - the characters look & sound how the reader decides, their names are pronounced by the reader,
not the writer. The writer must be aware of this too. And this personalises the experience of the story - the Lord of the Rings I experience when I read is different to the one you experience when you read it - because its full of
my Hills, Rivers & Valleys. Pronunciation of names of people & places is part of that personal experience, & the more we attempt to achieve a 'proper' uniform pronunciation, or single, agreed picture of a place or character, the more detatched we become from that unique experience of the story. If it was possible to see the characters & places of Middle-earth exactly as Tolkien himself saw them should we all make ourselves see them in that way? In the excerpt I gave earlier from OFS Tolkien seems to argue that would actually be a mistake, because the reader would have no input into the experience of the Story & therefore it would not touch them in the same way. Why is the pronunciation of names different from the images of places & characters - Tolkien effectively states that the reader
must be free to imagine the world & its inhabitants as they will for the story to work, & I can't see how the pronunciation of names & words is a different case.