Childish Imaginings and the Tyranny of Art

I hadn't thought about this in years, but a comment on a recent post reminded me that when I first read The Lord of the Rings I imagined orcs as having crocodile heads. It is hard to believe there was a time when I had not seen a Warhammer, Fighting Fantasy, or D&D orc. But obviously there was, and in my childish imaginings that was what they looked like.

This would have been in around 1990, I think, when I was still in primary school - about 9 years old. I had read The Hobbit some years before that, and had heard of The Lord of the Rings but had a vague sense it might be "scary". But, while I am not sure I knew there was such a thing as a "fantasy genre", I knew that I was drawn to that kind of book and I suppose it was inevitable that sooner or later I'd move on to reading the Rings trilogy. I remember the immediate trigger vividly: a friend of mine had taken The Fellowship of the Ring out from the library and was showing it to me in school. I don't think either of us yet understood there was a concept of a trilogy, and we probably thought the Rings books were like the Narnia ones; there was notionally an order, but you could read them as stand-alone pieces. So that night I went and got out The Two Towers and started from there.

(Starting The Lord of the Rings half-way through is an interesting experience: beginning in media res, there's a lot to figure out, but the narrative isn't harmed at all, and to this day I still think of the main characters of the trilogy as really being Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, Gandalf and Merry and Pippin. Frodo and Sam's journey still somehow feels like a sideshow, because I was already caught up in the other branch of the plot - Helm's Deep and all that - before I even knew who Frodo was.)

Illustrations and art can be wonderful things but they can also, perversely, be very restrictive of the imagination. When I read a book I tend, like most people I suppose, to built a picture of what is going on in my mind's eye, but it's very hard to do this when an artist's vision has been imposed on you. The crocodile-head orcs were vivid to me once, but now I've seen a thousand pictures of orcs or various kinds, it's hard for me to think of them that way. Not impossible, but it requires mental effort. This problem is made infinitely worse when you've seen a film or televised version of a book: who now can read The Fellowship of the Ring and not picture Gandalf as Ian McKellan, Aragorn as Viggo Mortensen, and Legolas as a petrified piece of cardboard masquerading as an actor? I must have had a picture in my mind of all of these characters as a child, when I hadn't seen an artistic representation of any of them, but they're largely lost to me now.

The tyranny of art is a benevolent and beautiful dictatorship, but it is a dictatorship all the same. The images it conjures in your mind are not your own - they are a piece of the artist's imagination, etched into your brain. Much is gained from this, but some things, like the crocodile-head orcs or the non-McKellan Gandalf, are lost. This is why, sometimes, I wonder whether when it comes to art in RPG books, less is really more.