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By Michael D.C. Drout

Dr. Drout is a professor of English at Wheaton College and the author of “The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creation.”

When you are reading aloud to a 7-year-old, once you start using a particular voice for a character’s dialogue, you are stuck with that voice for the rest of the book. When that book is J.R.R. Tolkien’s high fantasy epic “The Lord of the Rings,” there is plenty of time to regret a careless choice in an early chapter. My father, wisely, used only his own voice when he read it to me. Fifty years later, I can still hear his particular mispronunciations of some of the names, Elvish in a New Jersey accent. Still, when it........

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