Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing (7 page)

Do you see what Tolkien is doing? At least seven times in one novel, Frodo is forced to escape from places of comfort and refuge. And he leaves behind his refuge a couple more times in the succeeding novels.

Tolkien is of course setting us up for the very end of the novel, that moment where Frodo must sail off into the Grey Havens, leaving behind the world that he loved so dearly, the world that he saved.

Had Tolkien not emphasized how much Frodo (an orphan) longed for a home, that final scene would have had very little impact indeed. Instead, Frodo’s final farewell to the Shire is devastating, a real tear-jerker.

But do you see how Tolkien did it? He simply repeated an action over and over again, playing upon variations, trying to make each instance of leaving more powerful and difficult than the last—when appropriate.

Here’s another example, a very simple but powerful one. Perhaps one of the most compelling scenes for me was the Fellowship’s journey into and through the mines of
Moria
.

Do you recall the opening to that scene? The group must walk along the edge of a still pool, where the only sound is the occasional sound of dripping water. The
very solitude of the place sets them all on edge. One of the Hobbits throws a rock, and moments later the group is attacked by the “watcher” of the lake.

They escape the monster and make it into the Mines of
Moria
, only to have the door blocked with boulders behind them.

Inside the mine, Frodo cannot sleep that night for the dripping sound of water. (Note the repetition of a single spooky element, made unsettling by the attack of the watcher.) A few nights later, that dripping sound is replaced by the distant sound of a hammer going,
tink
,
tink
, clank,
tink
.

Suddenly, Frodo realizes that he’s not alone, and soon he sees the glowing eyes of Gollum in the cave.

Finally, as they near the exit, the “plink” of water, the “
tink
” of a hammer, is suddenly replaced by the sound of drums in the deep—huge thunderous sounds that roll through the cavern, roaring “Doom! Doom!
Doom!”

Here, the internal resonance is simply a repeated sound, one that grows louder, more unsettling, and more menacing with each repetition.

Here’s a third use of internal resonance in
The Lord of the Rings
: the journey through the underworld. We see the first hint of it in the Shire, when the Hobbits escape one of the nine riders by diving off the road. They find themselves in a cave-like overhang while one of the nine riders tries to draw them out, and Frodo imagines himself suddenly to be in a tunnel.

Later, as they leave the Shire, they dive through a hedge—and find themselves in a forest so deep that it seems almost lightless. After leaving Tom
Bombadil’s
house, they take too long on the road, and find themselves suddenly dragged into the lightless burrow of a
wight
.

They find themselves in another tunnel at the inn at
Bree
—a hobbit hole, where once again they are attacked by the nine riders.

They make it to
Weathertop
, and Frodo is stabbed with a magic blade that breaks off—but begins working its way to his heart. As he loses consciousness, he once again imagines himself to be in a tunnel.

The group heads toward
Mordor
, and along the way our protagonists are forced to take an ill-fated detour through the Mines of
Moria
.

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.

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
. . . .
’