Reading Tolkien Out Loud

In the olden days of oral culture, literature was spoken.  Stories were transmitted to their "readers" vocally or musically.  Those were the days of the minstrel, the scop, the skald.

Nowadays, most of our stories are consumed quietly, silently, individually.  We do so much silent reading that I think we forget--good writing is designed to be read aloud.  Why else would students be encouraged to read their own writing aloud when revising and proofreading?  Read-aloudability is essential for poetry, but is an important characteristic in all writing.  Living vocal chords breathe energy into the hollow bones of texts.

Read-aloudability is one of the reasons I love Tolkien so very much.

 As anyone who knows me well can attest, I adore Lord of the Rings for a great many reasons.  But read-aloudability is up there on the list.  Sometimes, when reading alone, I'll find myself quietly mouthing the words of the text as I read--as if the music of the text is too powerful to keep contained by silence.  In Peter Jackson's film trilogy, you can always tell when he, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens are lifting text directly from the source.  There is a lyricism in Tolkien's passages that is absent from the rest, no matter how well written it might be.

The White Tower of Ecthelion... glimmering like a spike of pearl and silver... 
...as nightfall in winter that comes without a star...
...the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise...

At a used bookstore in Boston recently, I found a book called Meditations on Middle-Earth (St. Martin's Press, 2002), which contains essays by several well-known fantasy authors, reflecting on their personal relationships with Tolkien's works.  One essay by Ursula K. Le Guin reminded me that Lord of the Rings is a particularly read-aloudable work of fiction.  Le Guin's essay, "Rhythmic Patterns in The Lord of the Rings," observes how Tolkien's facility with poetry infiltrates his narrative writing in the form of regular stress units.

Tolkien composes prose as if he were a poet or a minstrel.  Le Guin writes:

In poetry, the normal ratio [of stresses to syllables] is about 50 percent: that is, by and large, in poetry, one syllable out of two has a beat on it: Tum ta Tum ta ta Tum Tum ta, etc.... In narrative, that ratio goes down to one beat in two to four: ta Tum tatty Tum ta Tum tatatty, etc.... In discursive and technical writing, only every fourth or fifth syllable may get a beat; textbook prose tends to hobble along clogged by a superfluity of egregiously unnecessary and understressed polysyllables. 

Tolkien's prose runs to the normal narrative ratio of one stress every two to four syllables. In passages of intense action and feeling the ratio gets pretty close to 50 percent, like poetry; but only Tom[ Bombadil]'s speech can be scanned. (103-104)

[Note--I may have included the entirety of the above quotation solely on account of the witty brilliance of that final sentence of the first paragraph.]

Although unmistakably prose (most of the time), The Lord of the Rings behaves very much like poetry at important moments.  Playful country poetry in the Shire.  Elegant, graceful poetry among the Elves.  Grand, epic poetry when epic deeds are afoot.  "Tolkien must have heard what he wrote," she says (101-102).

Le Guin goes on to investigate how Tolkien employs "stress units" via imagery and themes (e.g. darkness/daylight, fear/courage, etc.), rather than traditional metrics.  Although Le Guin does not make the connection, her description of Tolkien's binary thematic "stresses" reminds me of Beowulf--at least how Tolkien interpreted it.  If I remember correctly, in the Monsters and the Critics, Tolkien extrapolates the balanced halves of a line of Anglo-Saxon poetry (four total stresses divided by a caesura) to the larger narrative structure of the total poem.  Wouldn't it make sense for Tolkien, who studied and loved Beowulf, to emulate such a technique in some way in his own writing?

Anyway, that is a digression.  Le Guin's essay interested me primarily for her analysis of Tolkien's prose at the more localized level--stress beats. Tolkien's writing abounds in iambs, trochees, and dactyls.  Irregularly, true--it is prose.  But it demands to be read aloud.  The acrobatics of teeth, tongue, and lips invite the stories to leap off the page and dance.

In fact, one might imagine Lord of the Rings being read aloud by a scop in a mead hall, with a harp balanced on his knee.