The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power...
-J. R. R. Tolkein, "On Fairy-Stories," A Tolkein Miscellany, 108.
1 comment:
The writing here is a bit dense, but I think it's really interesting - the idea that adjectives allow us to think abstractly. When I talk about a tiny bug, I'm allowing for the imaginative possibility of an enormous bug. And pink pigs allow for the possibility of plaid or polka dot pigs.
Post a Comment