Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing (8 page)

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.

T
he 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 create
s 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
.

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.

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.

A couple of years ago, I went out to sell books at the fair. I had dozens of books on display, and some of them have been around for years, but this was the first time that I’d ever been able to sit in front of buyers and get their reactions to the books. Frequently I had teens grab a
Runelords
book and say, “Oh, this is what dad likes.” Sometimes they even knew which book he’d read, but many of them would then look at the books a bit confusedly and then say, “Oh, no, this just looks like them.” Invariably the dad was either a reader of Terry Brooks or Robert Jordan, and the teen had simply recognized the style of the cover art. Yet in most cases, after realizing that I wasn’t Brooks or Jordan, the wife would pick up one of my books anyway. Why?
Resonance.
My book looked like the kind that her husband might like.

In other cases, moms would grab book
five
in the series and say, “Has Jaden read this one yet?” The book pictures a young man on a
graak
, a dragon-like creature
;
it turns out that there are a lot of
Jadens
out there who only like to read books about dragons.
Once again, resonance.

If you ask a person who describes himself as a “big science fiction and fantasy fan” what he likes to read, you will almost always find that his tastes are rather narrow. They’ll tell you, “I like J.K. Rowling” or “I love Orson Scott Card.” In short, they have a favorite author in the genre but haven’t read beyond that author. Or maybe they’ve read widely in a certain franchise—
Dragonlance
or Star Wars.
Resonance.