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    Transmedial Growth and Adaptation 251

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    Churrita de Oro
    The document discusses how Tolkien uses words to describe Treebeard's eyes and Saruman's voice in his works. It notes that words allow authors to control vagueness and easily manipulate ellipses in a text. Additionally, words are the most common and cost-effective element for building elaborate fictional worlds. However, words are also very connotative and rely on the audience's own experiences to have effect, as different readers will envision elements like bread or hills based on their own imaginations.

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    Transmedial Growth and Adaptation 251

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    Churrita de Oro
    9 views1 page
    The document discusses how Tolkien uses words to describe Treebeard's eyes and Saruman's voice in his works. It notes that words allow authors to control vagueness and easily manipulate ellipses in a text. Additionally, words are the most common and cost-effective element for building elaborate fictional worlds. However, words are also very connotative and rely on the audience's own experiences to have effect, as different readers will envision elements like bread or hills based on their own imaginations.

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    The document discusses how Tolkien uses words to describe Treebeard's eyes and Saruman's voice in his works. It notes that words allow authors to control vagueness and easily manipulate ellipses in a text. Additionally, words are the most common and cost-effective element for building elaborate fictional worlds. However, words are also very connotative and rely on the audience's own experiences to have effect, as different readers will envision elements like bread or hills based on their own imaginations.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    9 views1 page

    Transmedial Growth and Adaptation 251

    Uploaded by

    Churrita de Oro
    The document discusses how Tolkien uses words to describe Treebeard's eyes and Saruman's voice in his works. It notes that words allow authors to control vagueness and easily manipulate ellipses in a text. Additionally, words are the most common and cost-effective element for building elaborate fictional worlds. However, words are also very connotative and rely on the audience's own experiences to have effect, as different readers will envision elements like bread or hills based on their own imaginations.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    Transmedial Growth and Adaptation 251

    Interestingly, Tolkien even mediates the description through Pippin’s words,


    which are of course Tolkien’s own as well. Saruman’s voice receives a similar
    treatment, with a description of its effect rather than merely its sound:

    Suddenly another voice spoke, low and melodious, its very sound an
    enchantment. Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom
    report the words that they heard; and if they did, they wondered, for little
    power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that it was a
    delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reason-
    able, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise them-
    selves. When others spoke they seemed harsh and uncouth by contrast; and
    if they gainsaid the voice, anger was kindled in the hearts of those under
    the spell. For some the spell lasted only while the voice spoke to them, and
    when it spoke to another they smiled, as men do who see through a jug-
    gler’s trick while others gape at it. For many the sound of the voice alone
    was enough to hold them enthralled; but for those whom it conquered the
    spell endured when they were far away, and ever they heard that soft voice
    whispering and urging them. But none were unmoved; none rejected its
    pleas and its commands without an effort of mind and will, so long as its
    master had control of it.10

    Both Treebeard’s eyes and Saruman’s voice would be hard to incarnate into
    image and sound without losing the powers that Tolkien can attribute to them in
    a written description. Words can also control the level of vagueness that an author
    desires, and they can easily be manipulated to hide ellipses, helping them to
    go unnoticed in a text. Finally, they allow anyone to produce as elaborate and
    epically-scaled a world as one can imagine for no more than the cost of pencil and
    paper, making them the most common elements used in world-building.
    On the other hand, words are also the most provocative and connotative of
    world-building elements, relying upon the audience’s experiences and world
    gestalten to produce their effects. As Tolkien puts it:

    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 imagina-
    tion. 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 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

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