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"Read me a story!" One of my favorite parts of childhood was when my mother read me a story. We read lots of books - I remember Babar, Dr. Doolittle, and many magical childhood tales. Best of all were the Narnia stories by C. S. Lewis, and if you've taken a look at my "Inspiration and Provocation" page, you'll see that Narnia has continued to be very meaningful to me.

In the tenth grade, I was drawn irresistably into Tolkien's Middle Earth. True, the first time I read it was silently, but since then I've read The Lord of the Rings trilogy aloud at least twenty-five times. (Afraid I lost count after about the eleventh, but that was many years ago!) I read it to Martha several times, and could hardly wait for the children to grow old enough for it. By the way...each type of character has to have his or her own accent...

Are you getting the feeling that there's a particular type of book I like best? Maybe you're right... Try this quote out for size, see if it fits you:

Why do I love to read aloud?

Well, I love to read anything aloud. While working on my degrees in Linguistics, I learned that some people are primarily visual and other primarily auditory in the way they process and store language. Without a doubt, I'm the auditory kind, so it makes sense that to me, reading is best done aloud. It also makes sense that I love making voices and accents.

When do we find time to read aloud?

In this house, as in my parents' house, we read at just about any occasion that calls for entertainment:

Ian needed a 20-minute breathing treatment for his asthma every morning and evening. We read aloud to him while he had it.

Somebody has to clean up the kitchen after dinner. We read aloud to make the drudgery go faster.

At the end of the day, reading aloud draws Martha and me together. We've done it most evenings since we were first married. At first, we took turns: one reading and the other doing some craft project (for me it was usually calligraphy). Gradually it became apparent that reading aloud was my craft, so I do almost all of it now.

Long car trips are enlivened by reading aloud, though it can be tiring to read loud enough. In fact, we've just about given this up; the advent of tape and CD players in the cars has made it less of a necessity.

Special events, like Christmas, call for a favorite family story. (The story of "Dulce Domum" in Kenneth Graham's The Wind in the Willows is one of our favorites for Christmas, with Tolkien's Father Christmas Letters a close rival.)

What effect does all this reading aloud have on us?

I was interested to see in Smithsonian magazine a few years ago an article by a gentleman named Jim Trelease who has made reading aloud a crusade. Reading aloud as a "way of life" has a profound effect on everybody in the household. For one thing, it makes us abysmally ignorant of contemporary American culture, which is largely conveyed by television. (If you don't believe me, try giving up all TV for a year, and see how many conversaitons you lose the point of!)

In other respects, reading aloud is incredibly healthy. It makes books the center of attention and source of amusement, rather than television. Kids develop an affection for books. You have a lot more choice of books than you do of TV programs, even with today's mega-channel selection. You can discover how people felt in their own words a hundred or more years ago, which you never can on TV. It has a great effect on the kids' vocabulary - ours have all scored in the 99th percentile or higher on standardized language tests. This isn't just a proud father's boast - I sincerely believe just about all kids can read their way to better vocabulary. The whole world-view of books is different from that of TV: they aren't chopped into 10-minute fragments punctuated by ads, and they don't demand that you tune in now or forever miss this segment (being unable to read the directions on how to program your VCR ;-).

I often hear people lamenting the effect of TV on people's lives these days. What's the problem? TV is really 100% optional. Just pull the plug, go to the library, and borrow a stack of entertainment for free.

So what do we read?

We've read so many hundreds of books this way that it would be impossible for me to remember them all. Here are just a few favorites:

All-time tops: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.

Other books by C. S. Lewis, including Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, Letters to Children (which includes a few to me), Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, Surprised by Joy, and others too numerous to mention.

Other Tolkien books, including The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, Lost Tales, Unfinished Tales, Smith of Wooton Major, Father Christmas Letters,  and his own letters to his son Christopher.

Ursula K. LeGuin's science fiction, especially The Left Hand of Darkness and The Disposessed. The earlier books in this future-history series (Rocannon's World and several others) are good sci-fi, but the first mentioned are truly outstanding explorations of the human spirit. (I don't think everybody in the family agrees with me on this, but I'm doing the writing, aren't I?)

Zenna Henderson's "People" stories - The People: No Different Flesh and others

Madeleine L'Engle's fantasy stories - A Wrinkle in Time and several others. (I haven't read the Austin family series, but the gals in the house have, and like them.)

James Herriot's memoirs of veterinary practice in the Yorkshire dales - All Creatures Great and Small being the first. Herriot's gentle enthusiasm, his love of animals and people, and his frankness about his own human weakness, all combine to transport us into a refreshing sphere in which the hard work and ugliness of life are enchantingly transformed into joy and beauty. We all go to Herriot for refreshment from our daily burdens...though most of the stories tend to blur into one another for me! Now we'll get no more tales from him this side of heaven, but here's a last, "Na then, Mr. Herriot!" until then.

A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner in the children's department. (We were sorrowed to learn of Chrisopher Robin Milne's death recently; he owned a bookstore somewhere in England, fittingly enough.)

Graham Oakley's Church Mouse series, also in the children's dept, but with wicked little digs to keep the adults in stitches while they amuse the kids.

Anne of Green Gables, by L. M. Montgomery, is only the first in a long series. Katy and Marjorie were drawn to all the Montgomery books, and in 1989 we actually made a camping trip to Prince Edward Island to visit Green Gables. It's the leading tourist attraction in P.E.I., and we were able to complete our collection in the bookstore there, including several non-Anne books. I actually enjoyed them myself - not bad, for "girl" books (and it gave me a chance to perfect my Canadian accent!).

Anne McCaffrey's Pern books - Dragonflight etc. (and occasionally some non-Pern stories, but Pern is best from our point of view. I wonder...could we arrange a camping trip to visit Benden Weir?).

Arthur Ransome's sailing books: Swallows and Amazons is the first and best known, but my favorites are Peter Duck, Missy Lee, and We Never Meant to Go to Sea, which are really gripping. (We had to order these from Blackwell's in Oxford, so don't be surprised if you don't find them in your local bookstore or library. Amazon.com does have a fair selection of Ransome's books, though.)

C. S. Forester's Hornblower books, all of them from Mr. Midshipman Hornblower through Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies. (But accounts of the intervals on land can get pretty tedious...)

Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, starting with Master and Commander. The flavor is somewhat different from that of the Hornblower series, but shares with it the tradition of describing naval officers' dinners in detail - including food, wine, and conversation.

Ellis Peter's (Edith Pargeter's) Brother Cadfael series, which begins with A Morbid Taste for Bones and continues through nineteen or twenty jewel-like volumes (only seven of which have been made into TV-movies by the BBC!). We have also read some other Pargeter books, such as the "Heaven Tree" trilogy and one about Czechoslovakia; Martha worked through the dark, heavy "Brothers of Gwyneth" quartet; but Cadfael is tops for us. We were privileged to hear the current Vicar of Holy Cross, Shrewsbury (no "raven in the foregate" he!), who gave a slide presentation of the history of the Abbey Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, at a Detroit-area church in October, 1996. In 2000, we visted the Abbey Church and adjacent Cadfael discovery center. If you happen to find yourself in the vicinity of Shrewsbury, they're well worth a visit!

Tony Hillerman's Navajo Police books, such as Thief of Time. We've read some of his others, but Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn are his best characters by far. (We read Finding Moon, which I liked because it does a good job with Vietnam and with southeast Asian cultures, but Martha didn't so much.)

About Accents in The Lord of the Rings

Elves are so Irish-feeling (to me, anyway) that it just doesn't sound right to have them speak any other way. Of course, there are elves and Elves. The High Elves speak a more southern, Dublin-type Irish, while the Sindar and Wood Elves (including Legolas) speak with an Ulster sharpness. Neither group actually speaks with a "brogue" you understand - but the combination of intonation , lightness of tone, and vowel quality is definitely Irish. The dwarves, on the other hand, do excellently well with a thick, German accent. It goes very well with their deep, gravelly voices (inevitable, after years in the mines, you know). And the orcs...for years, they have fit so well with a Slavic accent, and now that I know so many wonderful Russian people who have emigrated to this country, I feel somewhat guilty to admit it, but cruel pronouncements sound twice as blood-curdelling when delivered with a thick Slavic accent, so I can't bear to trade it in on some other sound. "Where there's a whip, there's a will, my Slugs!" - "Gwerr derrs a gwip, derrs a gwill, my Swugz!"

Other humans in Middle Earth speak according to a logical pattern. Peoples with a long history of educated language use speak a sort of English which is intended to reflect a reconstructed 16th century sound. Did you know that in England, as recently as the late 18th century, finals Rs were pronounced? Turns out Benjamin Franklin used a phonetic transcription system, and when he was in England he clearly notes words like "better" with a final R sound (not "bettah") in the speech of a London lady. So the people of older Middle-earth cultures pronounce their final Rs, and make many vowels in a more "pure" (i.e. non-diphthongized) manner - but without the Irish rythm and intonation. It is appropriate for them to sound somewhat more like the Elves, since they revered the memory of the Elves and spoke Sindarin long after other humans forgot it. In fact, I use this "archaic" accent for all the old characters (except Gandalf, who speaks R.P. to the hobbits and never quite loses the habit!). This includes old characters both good and evil: Elrond Half-Elven, the Ents, Saruman, the Nazgûl, the Mouth of Sauron, even Smaug and his kin speak this way. Aragorn is somewhat tricky - his essentially British nature (as I understand it) necesitates R.P. most of the time, but when he arrives in Gondor and takes up his kingly responsibilities, it seems fitting for him to use the more archaic manner of speech. The people of Gondor themselves pronounce their final Rs but with a more Canadian flavour.

The Rohirrim, who learned the Common Speech from the men of Gondor, speak in a similar way - but being horse-breeders and riders, there is a distinctly American flavor to their speech. Sometimes this seems at odds with their clearly Old Anglo-Saxon prototypes, but...maybe it's OK anyway. By extension, their relatives in the north (men of the Long Lake and Dale, and the Beornings) have the same accent.

That covers most of them; characters in The Silmarillion, the Unfinished Tales, and the Lost Tales are provided with accents corresponding to those of their Third Age descendants. Odd characters like Mîm the Petty-Dwarf in The Silmarillion are a challange; I used a Swedish accent for him, since he was said to be distantly related to the more familiar Dwarves. The Wood Woses, Ghân-buri-Ghân and his tribe, speak with such thick, growly voices that it's hard to tell what sort of accent they have, but it's clearly the English of non-native speakers.

All in all, providing appropriate accents for Tolkien's characters is not only fun, but adds a cultural dimension to the reading and -though I wouldn't expect him to agree on all my choices - would probably please Tolkien himself.

Return to Why do I love to read aloud

Thank you, Katy Kramp, for giving me Jim Trelease's name! Katy adds, "His The Read-aloud Handbook is now considered a classic - nearly every public library has it."

Last update: 20 March 2006