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#1 | |
Illustrious Ulair
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: In the home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names,and impossible loyalties
Posts: 4,240
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#2 |
A Voice That Gainsayeth
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: In that far land beyond the Sea
Posts: 7,431
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Ha, brilliant point, davem. I consider myself knowing On Fairy Stories very well and basically remembering something from it all the time, even this particular part (I have always applied that one to criticise the movies
![]() Let me just note, I have never thought that Tolkien was so close in his thoughts to the reader-response criticism - in the light of this, this certainly is something related. Just, like, I never thought of that. But anyway, that means, long live Tsirith Ungol! (As that's the one, of all of them, which I just cannot discard ![]()
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"Should the story say 'he ate bread,' the dramatic producer can only show 'a piece of bread' according to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story will think of bread in general and picture it in some form of his own." -On Fairy-Stories |
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#3 | |
Illustrious Ulair
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: In the home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names,and impossible loyalties
Posts: 4,240
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My own position is that just as one is free to imagine (in fact, according to Tolkien quoted earlier, will both inevitably & rightly imagine) the world of the story in their own unique way, which will bring it alive for them in a way that no illustration or dramatisation could, so they must be free to 'hear' that world as they will - for the same reason. Of course, one is limited by the text to some degree - one may pronounce 'Feanor' as Fee-an-or, Fay-an-or or Fee-nor but one would not pronounce it 'Stephen'. |
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#4 | |
Ghost Prince of Cardolan
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Because Tolkien gave specific rules on pronuncation, I think a better parallel would be to compare pronunciation to, say, the doors at Moria, where we're given a specific drawing as to how it looked. If the Jackson films had deviated from that at all, claiming that it was Frodo's faulty memory reconstructing it (which would be well within their rights, since Moria is explicitly called Moria ['black shadow', only used post-Balrog] on the door), there would have been so much howling! Although to be fair the parallel isn't perfect as the pronunciation rules come from the Appendices and not from the text itself, and the Appendices are specifically only for those who really want to know more. Ultimately I think the whole thing is a bunch of pedantry as we geeks try to one-up each other. As I said earlier, I personally try to get my own pronunciation as close to the recommended ones as possible, but that's because I am a pedant and a linguistics geek to boot. If you want to pronounce them differently that's fine... but woe to you if you want to market that pronunciation! Mirkgirl's points are actually really good ones: to what extent have translators adapted spellings to fit with pronunciations? Does Tolkien's translator's guide give any hints? P.S. to Eonwe... Frodo at least probably got his transcriptions and pronunciations right; the other hobbits however tended to have really bad Shire accents when it came to the Elvish tongues.
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#5 | ||
Illustrious Ulair
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: In the home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names,and impossible loyalties
Posts: 4,240
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And if you go with the Translator Conceit, then even Tolkien the Translator could have been wrong about the correct pronunciation of languages which disappeared thousands of years ago. In fact, one could argue that individual pronunciations, avoiding the idea of 'correct/incorrect' fit that idea better than the kind of 'geekish' precision you're talking about. I note that we don't worry about the 'correct' pronunciation of the names in Homer or Malory ('You say 'Lance-e-lot', I say 'Launce-e-lot''). Quote:
As to 'marketing my pronunciations' - that's exactly the opposite of what I'm advocating - I'm for going with what feels right for the individual. |
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#6 |
Ghost Prince of Cardolan
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davem, by "marketing" I meant such things as adaptations with an audio component and/or settings of Tolkien songs, not simply telling people to pronounce things "your way"--things that actually make money off the notion that this adheres to Tolkien in the details.
And if we want to talk about making people feel like second class fans, pronunciation pedantry pales compared to, "You haven't read x?!?" (Although pronunciation is perhaps the most obvious form of this.) I first set out to read the Silm because people were telling me I still wasn't a true Tolkien fan yet. You actually do have a very interesting point on the "reconstructed" pronunciations... it rather reminds me of how you're "supposed" to pronounce classical Latin and Greek. We all know that this may be nothing like how it's actually pronounced, but we agree on it for clarity's sake. This is also why I'm so intrigued by words like "Nargothrond," which are pronounced one way according to the "official" rules but always scan differently in the Lays. One is tempted to say that there are exceptions, even in Elvish, that we will never know about.
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#7 | |
Illustrious Ulair
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: In the home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names,and impossible loyalties
Posts: 4,240
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Check the second row - pic 1 is Orthanc, pic 3 is Barad-dur, pic 4 is Minas(Mynas ![]() |
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#8 |
Flame Imperishable
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Right here
Posts: 3,928
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Not to mention the fact that the hobbits (even Frodo), who are the "authors" of the story, probably didn't pronounce the place names 100% correctly either. And what is correct anyway? Isn't the most commonly used pronunciation the accepted one after all?
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