Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing Read online

  Frodo and Sam later split off from the group and make their journey to Mordor—having to take Gollum’s secret path that will lead through Shelob’s lair.

  Merry and Pippin mirror that journey as they journey into the Entwood, beneath trees so old and hoary that they block out all light— until Merry and Pippin find themselves given shelter in Treebeard’s cave.

  Gandalf himself has a lightless journey after falling into the pit in the Mines of Moria. There, he chases the Balrog through endless caverns in an epic duel that is only related as he tells it to the Hobbits.

  Meanwhile, Aragorn and the others take their own lightless journeys—fighting the orcs in the caverns at Helm’s Deep— until at last Aragorn must take one final journey through a tunnel so that he can summon the spirits of the dead to fight in behalf of Gondor.

  And we cannot forget the final lightless journey—Frodo’s journey to the Crack of Doom.

  Each of these lightless journeys, of course, is a play upon a theme, designed to heighten that final moment when Frodo steps toward the Crack of Doom—and all light fails him.

  So, there I’ve given you three examples of how Tolkien uses internal resonance in The Lord of the Rings in order to heighten his reader’s emotions. Perhaps you will find this tool of some value as you plot your own novels.

  Language in The Lord of the Rings

  In 1962, Anthony Burgess published A Clockwork Orange, a futuristic morality tale dealing with the futility of using aversion therapy in trying to rehabilitate criminals. Critics have often praised the work for being bold and imaginative—in particular because Burgess creates his own slang. It seems that at the time, the idea that our language would evolve in the future and that a writer took that into account was something of a literary breakthrough.

  Yet Tolkien did something far more involved than come up with half a dozen neologisms and a couple of shifts in syntax. Tolkien began to play with languages in a way that few have ever done, and all of this deals with resonance. So it bothers me when I hear modern writers refer to what Tolkien did as a “literary stunt,” while many of those same folks would hail Anthony Burgess as a genius.

  Let me see if I can explain what Tolkien did. Right now I am writing in English. It’s a rather large language, primarily because it borrows from so many other languages. Throughout history, England has been conquered by a number of peoples—the Danes, the Normans, the Norse, the Anglo-Saxons, the Romans, and so on. With each invasion, the nobility and even some of the commoners adopted the language of the conquerors, so that often when we speak, we have a choice of several different words to choose from, each borrowed from a separate tongue, that all have roughly the same meaning.

  But of course, we don’t need words to mean the same, so we assign slightly different definitions to the words—we give them nuances. Thus, as the sun falls behind the hills we might say that it is “evening,” “twilight,” “dusk,” “gloaming,” “sunset,” or “nightfall.” In each of our minds, we develop a sense of gradations that probably don’t exist in most other languages. In my mind, evening is brighter than gloaming. Twilight is right in the middle of the act. Sunset is the moment when the sun is gone from the sky, and so on.

  Added to this barrage of conquerors, England sometimes became home to various refugees—such as Gypsies, Moors, and Jews—and England was also visited by traders and missionaries from other nations, so that the language absorbed terms this way.

  Then of course, as the English empire spread across the world, people came in contact with dozens of other cultures throughout Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas, and when a word was found that was useful, that word fell into common usage in English. Thus we have words like “desert,” which was borrowed from the Arabs. The English language didn’t require such a term—there are no deserts in England.

  The result is that today there are over two million words in the English language by some estimates, when you take into account all of the various terms used in specialized trades like law, medicine, the sciences, and so on.

  By contrast, most cultures get by with far fewer words. If you are living in a village in the Pacific islands where your society has had no contact with the outside world, you don’t need a huge vocabulary. You don’t need words like “engine,” “printing press,” or “processors.” Some languages have fewer than ten thousand words total. Often, new words are created in such languages by simply stacking existing nouns. A fellow once told me that in one Asian country where he lived, the word for white man was, “pigs that walk on two feet and talk, ha, ha!”

  So English has absorbed a large number of languages, and of course linguists realized long ago that words from different cultures tend to have various effects upon us emotionally. A person who uses a large number of Latinate words while speaking is often considered to be something of an egghead. A person who uses French too much may seem pretentious. Words from Old Dutch or Old Norse are often considered crude.

  As a philologist, Tolkien noted the influence that such words had upon his readers. As he began writing The Lord of the Rings, he realized that his Hobbits, his Men, his Elves, Orcs, Trolls, Dwarves, and so on would all need to have their own languages. Since, according to old German legend, the Elves and Dwarves were both offshoots of the same race, he initially decided to create languages for them that had Old German and Old Norse roots, while his Hobbits spoke a language with Old English roots.

  Like many linguists, Tolkien surely became enamored with trying to imagine what the precursor language to all of these tongues might have been. It is obvious as you look at them that they seem to have a single source, that Old Danish, Norse, English and a dozen other languages were all branches from one tree, sharing a common root. (Go to a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary and just thumb through at random if you like. You’ll find many words like “home” or “father” that have citations in a dozen languages that sound very similar, with only slight vowel shifts or the dropping of a consonant to differentiate them.)

  So Tolkien was enamored with these common roots, and he created his tongue “Westron” that was spoken by Hobbits and Dwarves. He modified his language so that it would seem to be a “precursor” to modern Germanic languages. Then he went back in time and developed a precursors and offshoots of Westron, much as I’m sure that he felt such languages might have developed. Tolkien took his development of races and cultures to an almost unimaginable extreme.

  Sadly, if you look at his Elves and Dwarves as characters alone, they seem to lack some personality. Instead, they seem more to be rather stock representations of their kind. So he differentiated their kinds.

  The goal of course was to create races that felt real—that resonated with his readers. Often, he did so by rooting his invented languages in sounds of languages drawn from our distant past.

  Now, on something of a side note, if you look at Tolkien’s work, it becomes clear that his works were written with poetic effects in mind.

  Let’s take a sample, a simple descriptive passage chosen at random. Gandalf is riding beside Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn, when he sees a city from afar and asks the Elf to describe what he sees in the distance:

  Legolas gazed ahead, shading his eyes from the level shafts of the new-risen sun. ‘I see a white stream that comes down from the snows,’ he said. ‘Where it issues from the shadow of the vale a green hill rises upon the east. A dike and mighty wall and thorny fence encircle it. Within there rise the roofs of houses; and in the midst, set upon a green terrace, there stands aloft a great hall of Men. And it seems to my eyes that it is thatched with gold. The light of it shines far over the land. Golden, too, are the posts of its doors. There men in bright mail stand; but all else within the courts are asleep.’

  ‘Edoras those courts are called,’ said Gandalf, ‘and Meduseld is the golden hall. There dwells Theoden son of Thengel, King of the Mark of Rohan. . . .’

  Now, as you look at these lines, you’ll note a lot of poetic effects. First, look at the
cadence. The length of the sentences seems very similar at first, but with each line the word count winds down:

  Legolas gazed ahead, shading his eyes from the level shafts of the new-risen sun.

  ‘I see a white stream that comes down from the snows,’ he said.

  ‘Where it issues from the shadow of the vale a green hill rises upon the east.

  A dike and mighty wall and thorny fence encircle it.

  Within there rise the roofs of houses; and in the midst,

  set upon a green terrace, there stands aloft a great hall of Men.

  And it seems to my eyes that it is thatched with gold.

  The light of it shines far over the land.

  Golden, too, are the posts of its doors.

  There men in bright mail stand;

  but all else within the courts are asleep.’

  ‘Edoras those courts are called,’ said Gandalf,

  ‘and Meduseld is the golden hall.

  There dwells Theoden son of Thengel,

  King of the Mark of Rohan. . . .’

  It seems to me that Tolkien wrote these lines to be read aloud, or perhaps chanted, as ancient storytellers would have done. As Hemingway once said, “The secret to all great writing is that it is poetry.”

  If you don’t see the poetry in the language, study the use of assonance. For example, notice how the long-I sound is repeated in the first two lines, or the long-O sound that runs throughout the passage, tying it together, and look at how consonance is used in his sentences, especially in the midst of each line. Such things are common in well written tales.

  But note too, how it is loaded with archaic language, words whose meanings have fallen out of use in the past four hundred years: vale, midst, aloft, hall, thatched, mail, courts, dwells, Mark. (Note that in this instance, the word “mark” may have one of two archaic meanings behind it. A “mark” is a tract of land upon the frontier, which describes Theoden’s realm well. But the word “mark” also describes any tract of land owned communally by German peasants.)

  But what interests me so much isn’t Tolkien’s rather common use of poetic devices: it’s what happens when he begins creating names and languages. When he mentions the names Edoras, Meduseld, Theoden, Thengel, and Mark of Rohan—there is something exciting about his language, a sense that it sounds familiar and if you studied it sufficiently, you just might figure out where it came from.

  I mentioned that he used Germanic languages in creating much of this, but Tolkien went much further than creating just one language. He also developed languages for his various elven races, for Orcs, for the Dark Lord Sauron, and so on.

  Now, just how many “languages” Tolkien created is hard to know. He names twenty or thirty in his works, but naming a language and creating a fully functioning lexicon are not quite the same things. What Tolkien really did, I suspect, is create three or four languages, and then try to show how they would have evolved over time as new dialects arose and then morphed over the ages into entirely different languages. So listing thirty names for languages doesn’t mean that he had created full lexicons for each of them.

  The important thing to note here, I think, is that Tolkien began to experiment with languages in some interesting ways. Some of Tolkien’s invented languages are rooted in our own. Thus his humans and his dwarves are given names that resonate with us. But among his elves, he does something different. Tolkien begins by trying to create a new language—a more elegant, musical, and beautiful language—than has ever existed before, a language of perfect poetry. Then for his Orcs, he creates a language that is more harsh and dissonant than others—a sinister and brutal language of grunts and hisses—that has interesting similarities to his elvish tongue.

  As Tolkien began creating his languages, about mid-way through The Lord of the Rings his work takes on new dimensions. You can go to various lands—the Shire, Rohan, Gondor, Lothlorien—and you’ll find that entire passages of description suddenly shift in style depending upon the land that you’re visiting.

  Years ago, when I wrote my first novel, On My Way to Paradise, I was dealing with a Panamanian doctor. In order to get it to sound natural, I often had to write most of the dialogue in Spanish, and then translate it into English.

  Tolkien was doing the same kind of thing, to a degree, with Old Norse, Old English, and so on. As a linguist, Tolkien became so attuned to words, that when he wrote, he began to try to create resonance through his choice of cenemes—the smallest units of language. That’s what separates him from the vast majority of writers, and that’s why even thirty-five years after I first picked up and enjoyed his work, I still respect what he did. Tolkien is definitely not a one-trick pony, a hack, or a fraud—as some modern critics might assert.

  Let me explain in more depth, since I’m sure that most of my readers haven’t studied linguistics. Normally when we talk about speech, we divide it into “phonemes,” small units of sound. We say that English, for example, has about 40 phonemes. Those phonemes are considered to be basic units of sound. Each of our consonants is a phoneme, as are a number of combinations—st, fr, th, gr, ch, wh, and so on. Then of course we have our vowels, which each have long sounds, short sounds, and various other forms, and we have semi-vowels like y and w that have a couple of possibilities.

  If you look at another language, say Navajo, you’ll find that it is built from a different set of phonemes, many of which are practically unpronounceable to native English speakers.

  Then of course you can go to the click languages of Africa, and to whistling languages of certain South American Indians, which use sounds that aren’t spoken in the traditional way at all, and you have new sets of “phonemes.”

  The problem of course for a linguist like Tolkien is that he recognizes that languages aren’t really made of phonemes any more than matter is made of atoms. There is a smaller unit of sound—the ceneme—from which languages are composed. The cenemes can be subtly different from the phonemes. For example, the “st” in “fist” is subtly different both in sound and pronunciation from the “st” in “strong.” If you say both sounds, you’ll notice that in “fist” you put more emphasis on the “t.” In “strong” you emphasize the “s.”

  As a linguist seeking the roots of words, Tolkien had to become adept at listening to cenemes for clues to a word’s origination rather than the larger, clumsier phoneme.

  And of course in trying to create his own languages, this became very important. He had to pay attention to even these smallest units of sound when creating his languages.

  Tolkien went back and did something quite amusing linguistically. One of his conceits for his world was that Elves, Gnomes, Orcs, Dwarves, and such were all real, and that their languages—and our language—all evolved from a common tongue spoken by the first elves.

  So Tolkien had to deal with language creation at the smallest possible unit—the ceneme.

  To try to create a unified language that takes into account all other languages is something that a couple of linguists have idly talked about doing, but no one that I know of besides Tolkien has really tried it. How would you account for click languages, and so on?

  To tell the truth, I understand Tolkien’s impulse. If you’ve been to England, particularly the area where he was born and raised, every hill, every trail, every old stack of bricks has a name. The name might be an Old English name, a Latin name, a Welsh name, a Norse name, and so on. Of course many of the towns have names that were once spoken in Latin, but got changed by the Welsh, and then became pronounced differently by the English, etc. So names of things in his area can be very confusing, and when you hear a name, if you’re a word lover, you just have to try to make sense of it.

  In the same way, Tolkien became interested in trying to make sense of language as a whole. Sure, he knew that he couldn’t reconstruct it. But he found joy in playing with it.

  So Tolkien was exploring language in a way that no writer before or since has ever done. He focused on it even to the level
of the ceneme.

  In Conclusion

  As a writer, Tolkien was keenly interested in using resonance both to inspire his creation and to ensnare an audience. In his exploration of language, he went deeper than any author before him.

  I feel almost as if he is an explorer who went to a distant land and returned with great treasures.

  Of course, there are certainly many people who aren’t interested in using resonance on that level. You probably won’t spend the rest of your life learning ancient languages so that you can duplicate Tolkien’s effects. But at the same time, I find what he did to be both intriguing and enlightening.

  Resonance within a Genre

  Earlier I discussed how authors use resonance within a genre. For many pages now, I’ve been discussing Tolkien. I recall as a teen feeling that his works were unique and original, yet somehow haunting. I wasn’t familiar then with many of the precursors to Tolkien’s works.

  It may not be obvious to a new writer, but resonance is the single greatest draw that you can try to invest into your work. When most people choose to buy a book or go to a movie, it is because it resonates with things that they have seen and enjoyed before.