Tolkien's opposition to illustrating fairy-tales

[Extollager]

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.

Really perceptive, Swank, if I may say so -- you've put into words something that I realize I've experienced too, but I'm not sure I have seen anyone state this sort of thing so plainly.

When I think of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (but haven't read the books for a while) I think it's the sense of a landscape, a walked-through landscape or series of landscapes that haunts me; also a sense that we would be better off in some ways if we lived like hobbits, by which I don't mean forswearing technology and so on, but experiencing "poetic imagination" with regard to the sky and stars, and clouds and branches overhead, and our own homes, etc. The four hobbits needed to go through all that so that they could come back to the Shire and defend their home better than they otherwise would have been able to, with a greater love for it. This fits with Tolkien's idea of Recovery in his profound Fairy-Stories essay.

 

[Ambrose]

Perhaps there is a distinction to be made between fairy stories and novels.

 

[Extollager]

Tolkien was referring to Fantasy. I don't think LotR is a "novel" -- it's a romance or long prose fantasy -- but some people do refer to it as being a novel. I don't know of anything Tolkien said that would discourage illustrations in novels, e.g. those of Anthony Trollope &c. Do folks here see LotR as being a novel? The term suggests to me a long prose fiction that (usually) emphasizes a surface, social realism type of description.

 

[Swank]

Tolkien was referring to Fantasy. I don't think LotR is a "novel" -- it's a romance or long prose fantasy -- but some people do refer to it as being a novel. I don't know of anything Tolkien said that would discourage illustrations in novels, e.g. those of Anthony Trollope &c. Do folks here see LotR as being a novel? The term suggests to me a long prose fiction that (usually) emphasizes a surface, social realism type of description.
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What makes it not a novel? The basic definition of a novel is a single fiction story of a certain length.

 

[Extollager]

Swank, OK, by that definition LotR could be a novel.