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Old 06-10-2005, 01:10 PM   #156
davem
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davem is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.davem is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
I don't want to 'downgrade' Tolkien's use of language - indeed, I think that ne reason the radio series 'feels' closer to LotR for me than the movie is that the adaptors used more of Tolkien's original language - as I said the radio series is more like a dramatised reading than an adatation.

My point is that Tolkien's use of language is intended to create images in the mind - 'living shapes that move from mind to mind'. The images almost exist apart from the language used to exress them. I suppose this is why the work has inspired so many artists (& filmmakers), why there is a desire to present the descriptions in a visual form. I wonder how many of us, on calling to mind events in the story actually call to mind the words ? For most of us, I think, what come to mind are the images formed in our minds by the words. So, it is the images created that affect us. Other words could have been used (maybe with less effect), but the images would still have been formed as we have them. I go back to Peig Sayers account of how she retained the stories she heard. She would 'see' them on the wall in front of her. Her son, Micheal O'Guiheen, talks about one story, The King of Ireland's Son, which would 'take two weeks of nights' to recount. Of course, there would be certain common phrases (as we find in Homer) whih would be used in the telling of such tales, but generally what the storyteller would do was describe the images they had 'seen' when they heard the story the first time. It was the images which were transmitted, not the words used to describe them. The repeated turns of phrase would serve almost as 'mnemonics', or connecting phrases to link the images being described.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Aiwendil
For a narrative art-form that is really based on images, we'd have to turn to film. Comic books, too, I suppose. I also wonder to what extent the "focus on images" that you see in the folk-tale is an objective fact about the genre and to what extent it is simply the thing that you as a reader react to most strongly.
I think that with movies & comicbooks we have a similar thing to what happened inside the heads of those hearing the old stories, with the essential difference that the hearer formed their own images out of what they had in their individual psyches. This is not the 'baggage' I've been talking about. In the folktales collected by Campbell & published as Popular Tales of the West Highlands we often find fairy castles described as larger versions of the ordinary houses people lived in, because thats all they had to go on.

When I talk about 'baggage' its not the 'raw material' of trees, hills, rivers, etc, that we must supply to bring the story to life in our imagination, but rather our own memories, literary, psychological, religious theories & beliefs, etc. So, if a writer mentions a hill, we supply the image of a hill, based on the hills we've seen, iin real life or in pictures. But, if on hearing that word 'hill' we start thinking 'Oh, yes, a hill! I remember when Fred & Sue & I went walking in the countryside, & we climbed that big hill at midday & I saw that cafe by the road side & we went down & had that meal, which wasn't too good & was bloody expensive, & actually I couldn't really afford it & it meant I had to put on hold buying that cd I'd intended to get till next payday...etc, then we've broken the enchantment. I think Buddhists refer to that as the 'butterfly mind', flitting from one thing to another & never focussing on the thing on front of us.

I think, in other words, that to truly experience any art form, we have to learn to focus on it, & not let ourselves be distracted by that kind of baggage. Its not so much that we have to become willing victims, surrendering all our autonomy, & letting ourselves be manipulated by the artist, its that we have to 'listen' as carefully as we can & make an effort not to be distracted by other things, or by ourselves - not something we can do completely, I acknowledge, but something we should make a real attempt to do, if we want to be enchanted - of course, we may not want to be enchanted: its optional. But if we don't make the effort we can't complain that it doesn't happen, or that at points it is broken. At times it may be necessary to ignore the workers coming in & moving the scenery about. If they are doing their job well they won't prove too intrusive.
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