Over the past few years, I’ve been working slowly (well, in fits and bursts) through a project that I’ve found really enriching and exciting – and, well, as of today it is complete. I’ve been recording my own readthrough of The Lord of the Rings. Complete, unabridged, unaided by…well, pretty much anything. And as of today, I have recorded and edited my very own LOTR. It’s been a project that’s hung over the last few years, and that has frankly been far more work than I ever would have guessed.
To say that I’m proud and delighted is, frankly, a bit of an understatement.
The project began as a way to stay in touch with my much younger sister – I no longer live in my home country, and wanted to undertake something that would allow us to stay in touch and give us something to talk about. Alas! my own irregular pace and slow progress made a mockery of that aim, but she’s valiantly followed along regardless. But in the end, the project was really just as much for me as for her.
Now, this isn’t a plug for my recorded version or anything (though I’ll include a few snippets of some reading at the end of this post, for anyone who fancies giving it a listen!). Apart from anything else, I have no ‘right’ to distribute the recordings, and don’t intend to. Rather, I wanted to write a little about my experience working through and recording the entire story. It is, as far as I am aware, a fairly novel undertaking (though by no means unique!), and as such it seemed worth reflecting on…and with any luck, my own experiences and ideas may be of moderate interest to you as well.
First and foremost, there is a very real line that LOTR fans will happily repeat often – that every reread of the books reveals some new facet, some new way of considering the story or the characters or the history. I do not disagree with this (I try to reread them every year or so), but reading them out loud has both cemented it as fact in my mind, and (as far as I’m concerned) been worth ten ‘silent’ rereads.
Taking time over each word and sentence, actually having to commit to understanding them and thinking about them and reading them with meaning, has really helped me to notice new things. And these observations have been narrative, but also technical (it’s hard to appreciate just how finely crafted Tolkien’s prose is without hearing or reading it aloud) and even on occasion philosophical (giving time and thought to the detail and purpose within the story).
Needless to say, it’s also helped me appreciate and enjoy the poems far better. My knowledge of poetry in general is fairly surface level, and it’s only been in the last five years or so that I’ve actively started working at bettering it. As such, reading through each and every one of the poems, really enjoying the craft and feel of each word and line and stanza, has really helped me to enjoy them. I now cannot imagine skipping a single poem if and when I reread the books – indeed, I’m looking forward to returning to them!
Indeed, so struck have I been by them that I’ve recently tried my hand at composing a musical setting for Tolkien’s ‘Upon the Hearth’ poem – well, two settings, in truth! One which is intended to be a plausible construction of its original ‘walking song’ version, and a second that is rather more inspired by early 20th century English art song, and features greater harmonic and textural complexity…ie, a version that reflects the musical idiom of Tolkien’s youth and that feels plausible in the faux-pastoral-19th century English world of the Shire.
Whether this musical dabbling goes any further or not, I cannot say. But there are several other poems I’m keen to experiment with musically, and honestly? The craft and creation of that music is reward enough for me.
Needless to say, this close reading of the text overall has been extremely rewarding for me – for the sake of understanding the prose, and for noticing really wonderful details sprinkled in through the tale. Indeed, more than a few of my previous LOTR-adjacent posts on this very blog have been inspired by things I’ve noticed while recording some relevant passage!
As for the recording process, it was amateur, to say the least. All but the first chapter were recorded in a small room in my apartment (really a glorified closet), on a fairly basic voice recorder with very minimal work done on levels and suchlike. As such, the occasional crack or creak creeps in from the outside world, or from my chair adjusting, or even from the book’s pages. My sound levels are all over the place. And, as a perennial lisper, my diction is by no means perfect.
That being said, I’m delighted with the result, and with how it flows and how it sounds. It is by no means a commercially polished project, but it’s as good as I could make it, and that’s ok by me.
As for approaching the text and the manner, I found an especial early joy in reading quick-fire and even argumentative dialogue – Bilbo and Gandalf, Boromir and Frodo, Gandalf and Denethor were highlights and (despite the rapid switches from tone to tone) often flowed extremely easily. The poems, as alluded to, were invariable highlights and truly delightful to read. And in settling down and truly giving the book time to breathe, I felt that many of Tolkien’s descriptive and prosaic passages truly came alive and, far from dragging or feeling egregious, provided a tactile and beautiful sense of the world and allowed the tale due time and space.
Less straightforward were the various multilingual digressions scattered throughout, particularly the Sindarin, Quenya, and Old English interjections. I am a dreadful student of language, and though I hopefully avoided a few common traps (there is narry a ‘Seleborn’ to be seen) I do not doubt that I stumbled into many more, and the extended passages in Sindarin proved especially tricky for me, often requiring multiple takes to even reach mediocrity. Some characters proved harder than others – I often found myself stumbling over Aragorn’s speech in particular, perhaps due to the high and archaic modes he sometimes employs.
And since I elected to record chapter-by-chapter, some of the longer ones proved straining for my amateur narrative tones…even armed with copious drinks. In particular, the combination of a long chapter and particularly ‘harsh’ voices (all Orcs, Gollum, Treebeard and even Gandalf were not soothing by any means) would sometimes leave me with an extremely bare timbre by the end of a session, and as such the quality of narration is sadly varied from chapter to chapter.
Speaking of these voices, as a keen RPer in my spare time, one of the chief challenges and attractions was, of course, to find distinctive and unique voices for as many characters as I could possibly manage. It was important to me to make each member of the Fellowship clearly understandable, and to land on voices that I was relatively sure I could replicate over chapters and long breaks. Some ended up being relatively close to previous adaptations – my Gandalf and my Sam owing a lot to Ian McKellen and Bill Nighy respectively.
Legolas’ sing-songy voice and Boromir’s commanding bass were relatively easy to discover, and (as a fairly prominent character) Frodo ended up sounding rather like me, but pitched higher and with a little more thought in his words. Merry was given a slight ‘lilt’ that was tricky to find but I was very pleased with (my thinking being that as a Bucklander his accent may very well be ‘queer’), and Pippin’s breathless rushing voice proved tricky to get through without stumbling, but very rewarding when I got it right! Aragorn presented me with rather a different problem, his low and husky voice (drawn from the narrations of The Prancing Pony Podcast) necessitating frequent sips of water!
I’ve never loved Tolkien’s Dwarves in nearly any adaptation of Middle-earth, and I was determined to find a Gimli that I liked. My Gimli’s voice was low and rich, but soft and with an accent I was careful not to reuse for any other character. The latter characteristic was based on Tolkien’s remarks that Khuzdul ….. , but the rest was entirely my invention. So, imagine my delight when midway through the project, Nature of Middle-earth was published, which had this to say about Dwarvish voices:
……It is false to make Dwarves [?uncreative] or poor linguists. They had great interest in languages – which was more or less dormant until they began to associate with other peoples – but they could not conceal their voices. Phonetically they were acute and could pronounce learned languages well, but their voices were very deep in tone with laryngeal coloration, and they among themselves spoke in a laryngeal whisper.
The Nature of Middle-earth, XIX Note on Dwarvish Voices, by J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Carl F. Hostetter
It was, in short, perfectly akin to the voice I’d already developed and started recording Gimli with – I couldn’t have been more pleased.
As for other characters, some were mine, some drew from previous depictions. My Faramir was like Boromir but softer, and my Denethor harsher and colder. It is difficult to escape Andy Serkis’ influence over Gollum, and Christopher Lee may never be bettered as Saruman. But my Wormtongue was (I think) a delightful departure from the norm, with thick and heavy oil the primary idea in my mind as I read his lines…I liked the idea that he had gained some small measure of knowledge from Saruman, and so his voice was likewise deep and unctuous, but rather less commanding and without Saruman’s assuredness.
Other, more minor or passing characters, doubtless ended up either blending together a little or (in the case of those who might be absent for many chapters, such as Elrond or Gaffer Gamgee) becoming alarmingly changed over their absence. A few, such as Barliman Butterbur, managed to hold strong however – helped, doubtless, by my determined insistence on reading him as a Hugh Laurie-esque busying bartender.
Alas! my feminine ranges are not nearly as variable as those for men, and so every female character landed on a range of ‘soft and low’ and ‘shrieking and rustic.’ This, perhaps, served some characters better than others (hopefully it allowed my Dernhelm reveal to be surprising without it seeming ‘off’) but overall was a struggle for me. A rather different struggle was presented by the Orcish characters met throughout, for whom I took great delight in exploring a range of whiny, belligerent, cunning (my Grishnakh is, if I may say so myself, superb), furious and foolish tones. Few of them were any good for my voice though, and I quickly learnt to read Orcs in quick bursts, with plenty of recovery time allowed immediately after.
One may fairly wonder, then – what next? And it is a good question – because, for all that this has been a difficult, demanding and slow project, it’s also been one that I’ve genuinely enjoyed and do not want to let it go quite so soon.
There are, of course, some obvious places to turn to. The Hobbit feels like a natural companion piece, and I suspect I will attempt it sooner or later (though I’m not eager to develop so many distinct Dwarvish voices…I may cut corners on all but the most important members of Thorin’s Company!). The Silmarillion presents rather a different challenge, given its high and archaic modes, but if I am able to get my tongue around it, I would love to try it.
But there’s material from LOTR that I may yet record, too. The Prologue (which I let lie, despite its importance and charm, for the sake of getting my sister ‘in’ to the story) is one obvious option, and something that I’ll surely record sooner or later. Certain of the Appendices, too, seem well-suited to narration, especially sections from Appendix A.
But in the short term, I fear I need a break from Middle-earth – but not from Tolkien! So the next items on the list are my beloved ‘Lesser Tales‘ – and indeed, I recorded two of them last year during my September Series, since it seemed like a good moment for an especially close reading! So, all that remains is to edit out my various and numerous stumbles in Farmer Giles and Niggle, and to record and edit Smith.
After that…we shall see. But I’ve truly genuinely enjoyed this process and found great merit in it – I’m not done with my amateur narrations, for better or worse. Not yet.
Finally, a few statistics. The entire recording has ended up being 48 hours and 4 minutes long. However, considerably more time than this has been spent on it, since I had to take breaks in reading most chapters, and would often stumble over and misspeak words and so had to go back and correct those passages…and then had to listen to every chapter again to edit out those errors. Hence, I do not know how long I ended up spending on it…conservatively, I would triple that figure.
The longest chapter in my narration is “Treebeard” at a whopping 1:45:13, just beating out “The Council of Elrond” by under 20 seconds (those languorous Ent voices doubtless did a lot of work, though the chapter is genuinely long!). After those two chapters, it’s a pretty stark drop off, with the next longest (“Minas Tirith” and “The Siege of Gondor”) each being a good half an hour shorter. However, a further seven chapters all also weigh in at over an hour each, making the aforementioned two titans true outliers.
The shortest was “Homeward Bound,” at a mere 21:31. Its nearest competition, “The Pyre of Denethor,” also weighed in at under 22 minutes. However, the disparity at this end of the scale was not nearly so marked, with a further 6 chapters lasting under 30 minutes.
Books I, II and III all lasted just over 9 hours each, with Book III being the longest at 9 hours and 18 minutes, but Book II’s chapters lasting longer on average (Book II was the only book without a single chapter under half an hour). Book VI was the shortest at a mere 6 hours and 34 minutes, with Book IV lasting for 6 hours and 47 minutes and Book V pushing just over 7 hours. However, Book IV had the shortest chapters by far on average, and was the only book not to have any chapter last over an hour.
The only special effect I ever used was in creating the voice of Sauron, which appears only in a single passage, after Pippin has looked in the palantír. Apart from that, it is a straight and “true” narration (edits aside for the sake of removing stumbles and swearing at stumbles).
Finally, I do not easily cry. At all. There were two passages, though, that I simply could not get through without tears.
The first, I was prepared for…because on previous rereads it has also deeply moved me, and many others. It did not make it easier to read, but the crushing weight of despair during the Siege of Gondor, the unrelenting horror and destruction and fear and evil, is so expertly built up through the opening of Book V…only to be relieved, of course, in one incredibly beautiful and moving moment of eucatastrophic joy.
Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.
And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin’s sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.
The Lord of the Rings, Book V, Chapter 4, ‘The Siege of Gondor,’ by J.R.R. Tolkien
It genuinely took me about 5 minutes to read that passage out loud, and even then, it is a warbling and cracked passage. But I was at least anticipating that it would be difficult, unlike the second, which snuck up on me completely by surprise as Sam stands at the Grey Havens, all alone as the ship makes ready to depart:
But even as they stood there, and the Elves were going aboard, and all was being made ready to depart, up rode Merry and Pippin in great haste. And amid his tears Pippin laughed.
‘You tried to give us the slip once before and failed, Frodo,’ he said. ‘This time you have nearly succeeded, but you have failed again. It was not Sam, though, that gave you away this time, but Gandalf himself!’
The Lord of the Rings, Book VI, Chapter 9, ‘The Grey Havens,’ by J.R.R. Tolkien
That little passage has never especially struck me before – and, while I had to catch myself several other times as the book concluded, I managed to curtail tears. Except here. For some reason, that moment of Merry and Pippin dashing, making it to the Sea in the nick of time, for the sake of farewelling one friend and comforting another, really got me. And as with the coming of Rohan, there remains in the final recording a little wobble as I read, “…up rode Merry and Pippin.”
I’m not sure why. Though there is a striking similarity between the two passages, the latter in miniature, as hope and succour come unlooked for even at the brink of the precipice, and friendship wins out over fear. In any case, even now writing this post and rereading the passage, my eyes are misty.
What an extraordinary book.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thanks for reading – feel free to check out anything else you may be interested in on the blog, there’s plenty more to discover! Follow me on Facebook and on Twitter to stay up to date with The Blog of Mazarbul, and if you want to join in the discussion, write a comment below or send an email. Finally, if you really enjoyed the post above, you can support the blog via Paypal, and keep The Blog of Mazarbul running. Thanks for reading, and may your beards never grow thin!
