Tolkien's opposition to illustrating fairy-tales

[Extollager]

From "On Fairy-Stories" in Tree and Leaf, reprinted in The Tolkien Reader (1966):

On page 49: "In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature."

On page 80: "However good in themselves, illustrations do little good to fairy-stories. 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 of these things, to their ideas; yet each hearer will give to them a peculiar personal embodiment in his imagination. Should the story say 'he ate bread,' the dramatic producer or painter 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. If a story says 'he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below,' the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but especially of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word."

Is there interest in discussing this? Please, let's avoid, at least for a while, responses of the "Tolkien himself illustrated The Hobbit, Tolkien was willing for an animated LotR movie to be made," etc. sort.

 

[Hugh]

Over the years I've read various people commenting how a particular landscape they know reminds them of the Shire. Some of these have surprised me as my own images can be significantly different. The point I'm making is that each person has their own heart-image of the Shire, and these can vary greatly.

 

[farntfar]

I can, if I try hard, remember more or less the picture of Aragorn that I had, when I first read LOTR; partly because my vision of him very much resembled a friend of mine, who I considered brave and strong and virtuous.

Nevertheless, if I think of Aragorn now, he looks like Viggo Mortensen. So in that sense, my own imagination has been corrupted by the film.
I don't think I have any recollection of my original pictures of the hobbits, other than to say Frodo looked nothing like Elijah Wood.

On the other hand, I can't say my appreciation of the story has been greatly damaged by these changes in the physical forms of the characters. And being able to recognise most of the plotlines where the films differed from the books, I am able to appreciate both narratives.

I dare say that hearing a dramatisation of a book on the radio could similarly corrupt my go-to voice of the characters. Is a radio adaptation therefore also to be shunned? My appreciation of Gandalf, for instance, has not been damaged, because he now always sounds to me like Ian McKellen when I read the book, and Lord Peter Wimsey will for ever sound like Ian Carmichael.

 

[Lady of Winterfell]

For the LOTR trilogy, I saw the movies first and then read the books. Therefore I picture the characters, locations, etc as they were in the movies. I'm fine with this, but I do wonder what I would have imagined had it been the other way around?

I did read The Hobbit in 6th grade before seeing any version of it on screen. I still vividly remember my mental picture of Bilbo, and especially the barrels down the river section.

Perhaps this is one reason why book fans can find it hard to embrace adaptations, especially of highly descriptive stories. We all create the world in our own minds, as Tolkien says, based on our own experiences. In a way, we all get to be the illustrator...but inside our heads rather than on the page. That being said, depending on the story, I do enjoy seeking out art to look at and make it more 'real' in my own head. I've done this for Lord of the Rings, Anne McCaffrey's Pern books, Game of Thrones, etc.

 

[HareBrain]

but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but especially of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word."

Much as I love Tolkien's work, I don't really understand his point here. Why is the reader's own picture, based on their own experience, necessarily more valuable than someone else's just because it's more personal? I would agree that adopting someone else's illustration as one's own definitive visual version is restrictive, but I don't think seeing an illustration "imposes" anything. I love Tolkien's illustrations to The Hobbit, and they do affect my overall impression of the story, but they don't determine what i see in my mind's eye when reading it. And my life would be poorer for not having seen the work of Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen or Rodney Matthews, all of whose styles are a long way from what I could have imagined by myself.

 

[Extollager]

Tolkien's comment relates to his thesis that an aspect of fairy-tales is their capacity to give us an enriched appreciation of commonplace things (bread, wine, etc.). I'm certain that that happened in my own youthful days. For example, from where I lived I could look up a valley and see a distant red light, and this related to my reading of LotR with the occasional references to the distant red light presumably of Mt. Doom. It's not that what I saw seemed close to how I would have conceived the Middle-earth scenes. But there was an elusive association.

Now I think "elusive associations" can be an important quality in poetic experience, whether in fantasy or not. The trajectory of our culture is against this kind of experience. It suppresses poetic experience by bombarding us with, and hurrying us past, highly "finished" images, whether in books, comics, games, or (especially) movies. Probably there are millions of people now who have seen the LotR movies, with their extremely finished imagery, and who would, consequently, get almost not a flicker of poetic feeling from "elusive" sources. No; for us, it's all got to be "finished," explicit -- so that we might be superficially pleased ("Cool!"). This can apply also to detailed illustrations by Alan Lee and a bunch of much inferior artists. We stare appreciatively. But we are not, as Tolkien would put it in his essay, "enchanted." We might not even have any notion of what he was driving at.

 

[The Big Peat]

Much as I love Tolkien's work, I don't really understand his point here. Why is the reader's own picture, based on their own experience, necessarily more valuable than someone else's just because it's more personal? I would agree that adopting someone else's illustration as one's own definitive visual version is restrictive, but I don't think seeing an illustration "imposes" anything. I love Tolkien's illustrations to The Hobbit, and they do affect my overall impression of the story, but they don't determine what i see in my mind's eye when reading it. And my life would be poorer for not having seen the work of Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen or Rodney Matthews, all of whose styles are a long way from what I could have imagined by myself.

Because the more personal picture will have the greatest resonance and personal meeting.

 

[Pyan]

And my life would be poorer for not having seen the work of Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen or Rodney Matthews, all of whose styles are a long way from what I could have imagined by myself.

Absolutely agree - and I'd add Pauline Baynes and Ted Nasmith to the list.
It's literally in the eye of the beholder - I, for one, am not going to lose any sleep whatsoever if a portrayal of any part of the books doesn't match with what my own mind's eye knows to be "right".

 

[HareBrain]

Because the more personal picture will have the greatest resonance and personal meeting.

I'm not sure that's always true. When I read the line Tolkien gives as an example, "he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below" my mind's eye conjures up a vague image of a generic scene. I've no idea where it comes from. It's not a particular scene from my past, and I can't identify it as any particular place or mixture thereof. It has no real meaning for me, and I could easily get more from an illustration of the same line.

Having said that, here's a short passage from The Fellowship of the Ring:

Away eastward the sun was rising red out of the mists that lay thick on the world. Touched with gold and red the autumn trees seemed to be sailing rootless in a shadowy sea. A little below him to the left the road ran down steeply into a hollow and disappeared.

For me that is incredibly evocative. I can picture it so clearly that anyone's illustration would be pointless and possibly irritating. So I guess I agree with Tolkien where the writing is especially evocative, and that probably varies from person to person.

 

[KGeo777]

I get what he's saying--and as a writer it makes sense for him to regard illustrations as a barrier to a direct relationship with the reader.
He feels it's not as intimate or his voice is being diverted to the illustrator's imagination.
But I also agree that it depends on the person. Some people may have such a limited imagination that they get inspired by seeing an illustration as a guide.

Most book illustrations don't capture every paragraph of the work so your imagination does get used.
Have to think if when reading a work with illustrations --would my mind use them as a guide when reading?
Not sure about that.
I am pretty sure I read The Divine Comedy after seeing Dore's illustrations. I don't know that I was thinking of etchings as I read--you have to focus on the text.
Plus sometimes when you see someone else's illustration, it does not match what you are thinking of so you reject it as a reference guide.

 

[Extollager]

I posted this here at Chrons in 2012:

I want to draw attention to Tolkien’s own description of how his prose works, of what he was trying to achieve. In one of the endnotes appended to “On Fairy-stories,” he includes the following revealing passage setting forth his narrative method, in which he makes clear his goal of writing in such a way as to draw in his readers, making them participate in the creation of the fictional world by encouraging them to draw on their own personal memories when reading one of his evocative passages:

[quoting Tolkien:]..... If a story says “he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below,” the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but specially out of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word. ....

Rateliff continues:

Tolkien’s contrast here of a single image presented to the passive viewer with the internal personalized visualization of a reader, who thus participates in the (sub)creation of the work, is of a piece with his championing, in the Foreword of the second edition to The Lord of the Rings, of what he calls applicability: his refusal to impose a single authorial or “allegorical” meaning on a work.8 I would argue that the style in which he chose to write, which he painstakingly developed over several decades until it reached its peak in The Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham and The Lord of the Rings and some of the late Silmarillion material, is deliberately crafted to spark reader participation. That many readers do get drawn in is witnessed by the intense investment so many people have in these books, the strong personal connection they form with the story, the almost visceral rejection of illustrations or dramatizations that do not fit their own inner vision of the characters, the returning to reread the books again and again to renew our acquaintance with the imaginary world.

[Rateliff quotes a Tolkien passage and a John Bellairs passage. He comments:]

note that in the passage from Tolkien, he does not describe every detail—what color were the rocks? who was on either side of Frodo as he sat huddled against the bitter cold? But Tolkien does tell us everything we need to know, in general terms with just enough specific detail to bring the scene home, to guide the reader’s imagination, to draw on our own memories of being cold and frozen, exhausted and miserable. We do not need to know what Frodo looked like, because we are looking through his eyes; too much detail would actually limit the applicability......

.....he often describes a scene not as you would experience it but as you would remember it afterwards. That is, his prose assumes the tone of things which have already happened, as they are stored in our memory. Thus the “walking bits,” which have so annoyed impatient readers who are only reading for the plot, do not in fact detail every day of Frodo’s year-long journey but instead are rendered down to a relatively few vivid images, such as would linger in the memory long after the event. After you have read these passages and think back on them, they very strongly resemble your actual memories of similar events (in fact, the very ones that provided the mental images that flashed through your mind when reading them): a general recollection of where you were and what you were doing anchored by a few sharp, vivid, specific details that stand out. Thus the memory of reading the story gains the associations of events in the reader’s own life, because the one has already drawn upon the other.

[Resuming in 2024] Rateliff's insight here is one of the best things I have ever read about how Tolkien writes. It's very important. This way in which Tolkien writes is one of the reasons why his account of "mundane" matters, such as the passages about the hobbits getting lost in the Withywindle valley, is more enchanting than the overt fantasy of many authors.

Now take the Alan Lee illustrations. In their definiteness, they subtly work against Tolkien's style, because they are so "immediate." They convey the impression: "Here is what that scene in the text looked like. Here it is for you to examine. It is an authoritative image." It is not the scene as remembered but the scene as observed at the moment. And so the pictures work against Tolkien's style.

I don't hate the Lee pictures. He is the best of the living Tolkien illustrators by a long way. With other illustrators I often feel a kind of disgust. Lee doesn't disgust me, but, looking at Lee's work, I always (I think I can say always) feel a little sense of disappointment. I can appreciate them and yet "no, not this" could describe my feelings. Something vital is missing. They are the artworks of a man who has read a book, perhaps multiple times, and applies his considerable skills to rendering a picture based on the words in the book. But they don't seem to be "remembered." Really they are kind of violations of the book because they miss that all-important quality of Tolkien's prose. Yet for many readers the pictures will freeze into their minds the sense that here is what Galadriel and Shelob, Samwise and Gollum, etc. looked like; all the more if those readers have seen Jackson's movies, which are so close to Lee's depictions.

Do think about Rateliff's remarks, which are taken from an article in Tolkien Studies #6.

 

[The Big Peat]

I'm not sure that's always true. When I read the line Tolkien gives as an example, "he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below" my mind's eye conjures up a vague image of a generic scene. I've no idea where it comes from. It's not a particular scene from my past, and I can't identify it as any particular place or mixture thereof. It has no real meaning for me, and I could easily get more from an illustration of the same line.

Having said that, here's a short passage from The Fellowship of the Ring:

Away eastward the sun was rising red out of the mists that lay thick on the world. Touched with gold and red the autumn trees seemed to be sailing rootless in a shadowy sea. A little below him to the left the road ran down steeply into a hollow and disappeared.

For me that is incredibly evocative. I can picture it so clearly that anyone's illustration would be pointless and possibly irritating. So I guess I agree with Tolkien where the writing is especially evocative, and that probably varies from person to person.

Perhaps it'd have been better if I'd said "seeking the more personal picture offers the chance for the greatest resonance and personal meaning". Because you're right, it doesn't always happen.

But when it does - and it'd be fair to note art too can tap that seam of personal memory - it's extremely powerful.

 

[beccabear67]

My shelf of heavily illustrated fairy and folk tales disagrees with the author of true literature. I do wish I had my illustrated Hobbit book back to go with them, lost in a shuffle somehow.

I remember the Ballantine 'Rings' paperbacks I had in the '70s had more of a landscape cover and I didn't feel any lack of character drawings as they were very well described. It might be that 'ornamentation' suits them best?

 

[farntfar]

Before your last entry, @Extollager, I had already thought, and nearly posted about, the fact that, although I liked the Pauline Baynes illustrations that accompany my copies of Farmer Gilles of Ham, and Smith of Wootton Major, they do not correspond to my visions of the narrative.
My idea of Niggle's tree, however, has been greatly influenced by Pauline's illustration, if not her picture of Niggle and Parish themselves.

It is perfectly reasonable to enjoy and appreciate someone else's visions of these things without throwing away your own mind's pictures.

As I said earlier, however, the Peter Jackson images have mostly supplanted my original thoughts.

 

[Extollager]

The thing about Baynes's drawings in Giles and Smith is that they are decorative. They are an invitation into those stories. My experience with the work of Alan Lee and others is that they come across very differently to me, not as invitations into the story Tolkien wrote, but realistic depictions of the various scenes.

The same thing is true of nearly all of Tolkien's illustrations for the Hobbit. They are wonderful, but obviously stylized. The paintings are less obviously decorative (though check out the rendering of the trees in "Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft-Elves"). Now the frontispiece (Hobbiton) is superficially more "realistic"/"photographic" than (say) the drawing of the Elf-King's forest-hall. But the perspective is certainly free. That's even more noticeable in "Bilbo Woke Up." I don't know about others, but in that one, what draws my eye the most is not the painting of the immature eagle and the booted Bilbo, but the view from the cliff, of the clouds, trees, mist, and distance mountains. And the perspective there is free to say the least. I dearly love the evocation of distance in that painting. I am confident that the eagle has never meant much to me. Here's someone's partial reproduction of the painting.

In the entire painting, I relish the sense of great height and depth.

I don't actually dislike the eagle and recumbent Bilbo -- don't misunderstand me. But they are the least satisfactory elements of this painting.

 

[HareBrain]

I dearly love the evocation of distance in that painting.

I agree, and the same element comes up in his paintings of Hobbiton and Rivendell, and the drawing of Bilbo at Bag-End at the end of the book. Those glimpses of a faint and distant horizon really pulled at me as a kid, and have done ever since. Thinking about it, it's striking how often Tolkien mentions the same thing in the texts. It's clearly key to his idea of adventure.

 

[Extollager]

Yes, HB. I am tempted to say that Tolkien above anyone else gave me the imaginative and emotional experience of geographical distance as a youngster, and it has stayed with me and is something I would hate to lose.

 

[Pyan]

Those glimpses of a faint and distant horizon

Just about the only time the Hobbit movies pulled any heart strings of mine was the first glimpse of Erebor - for much the same reason.

 

[Swank]

Much as I love Tolkien's work, I don't really understand his point here. Why is the reader's own picture, based on their own experience, necessarily more valuable than someone else's just because it's more personal? I would agree that adopting someone else's illustration as one's own definitive visual version is restrictive, but I don't think seeing an illustration "imposes" anything. I love Tolkien's illustrations to The Hobbit, and they do affect my overall impression of the story, but they don't determine what i see in my mind's eye when reading it. And my life would be poorer for not having seen the work of Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen or Rodney Matthews, all of whose styles are a long way from what I could have imagined by myself.

Perhaps he's suggesting that imagining the bread you are familiar with puts you in the story rather than witnessing the story as a visual observer.

Nevertheless, if I think of Aragorn now, he looks like Viggo Mortensen. So in that sense, my own imagination has been corrupted by the film.
I don't think I have any recollection of my original pictures of the hobbits, other than to say Frodo looked nothing like Elijah Wood.

I guess I'm surprised how often people are invested in having a picture (mental or otherwise) of how a character looks. I have several particular favorite written characters and I have only the vaguest conception of how they look - and that doesn't bother me because they exist as their actions and words rather than their visual impact.

 

[paeng]

In light of this, I remember reading that Tolkien was critical of industrialization and a consumer society, and wrote LOTR and others to guide young readers to the medieval epics of Europe.