I'm afraid that I have a lot of cognitive dissonance about the movies, because I really hate quite a few components, but I still really like them. (srsly, I didn't use the cog dis lightly.)
And what's possibly the weirdest thing, coming from an artist/designer is that I Never had pictures in my head. I read all 4 books first in 1966. It seems likely I' m just weird, but I'm perfectly capable of not picturing stories I nonetheless love.
I LOATHE most of the "art" that came before. The Hildebrants are unspeakable, and if you want to complain about ppl not seeing an imposed image, let's go hunt down that crap and burn it. The best thing about the "best" artists doing Tolkien before the movies was that they mostly "suggested" - landscapes, cities, etc.
Oddly, what really turned me on, in the first couple of years after I first read Tolkien - well after the sheer amazingness of the story - was the languages, the orthography, and all that. I spent part of a summer when I was 16 tracking Anglo-Saxon runic monuments in Britain, because dwarf runes led me to the futhark/thork (f'ing iPad, does not do thorns), learned rather more than I actually wanted to about Attila and his legends (I'm sure you can fill in the rest of that!) and once could write in tengwar script as easily as in roman. Also I totally know the difference between "will" and "shall". Fear me!
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And what's possibly the weirdest thing, coming from an artist/designer is that I Never had pictures in my head. I read all 4 books first in 1966. It seems likely I' m just weird, but I'm perfectly capable of not picturing stories I nonetheless love.
I LOATHE most of the "art" that came before. The Hildebrants are unspeakable, and if you want to complain about ppl not seeing an imposed image, let's go hunt down that crap and burn it. The best thing about the "best" artists doing Tolkien before the movies was that they mostly "suggested" - landscapes, cities, etc.
Oddly, what really turned me on, in the first couple of years after I first read Tolkien - well after the sheer amazingness of the story - was the languages, the orthography, and all that. I spent part of a summer when I was 16 tracking Anglo-Saxon runic monuments in Britain, because dwarf runes led me to the futhark/thork (f'ing iPad, does not do thorns), learned rather more than I actually wanted to about Attila and his legends (I'm sure you can fill in the rest of that!) and once could write in tengwar script as easily as in roman. Also I totally know the difference between "will" and "shall". Fear me!