Newsgroup: it.fan.scrittori.tolkien
Titolo: Tolkien sul TLS

E' giovedě, sfogliando come di consuento il TLS trovo la recensione: 
Diana Pavlac Glyer
"THE COMPANY THEY KEEP. C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as writers in
community"
293pp. Kent State University Press (US $45)
There is magic in the last line of The Lord of the Rings. To recap: the
stolidly courageous Sam Gamgee, having watched his best friend, Frodo
Baggins, sail towards the Grey Havens and into a kind of death, is left to
walk back to the Shire where he finds his wife and children waiting with
the promise of a quiet life far from the slaughter of the War of the Ring.
J. R. R. Tolkien finishes with the sentence: "‘Well, I'm back,’ he said".
It is a touchingly understated conclusion which returns the prose to the
homely simplicity of the inaugural chapters after the archaic epic mode of
The Return of the King.
However, as Diana Pavlac Glyer tells us in her scholarly and perceptive
study The Company They Keep, this is not how Tolkien originally intended
to finish his trilogy. He had in mind a further epilogue, set sixteen
years after the events of the rest of the book, which would have provided
another, superfluous glimpse into Gamgee's domesticity. In this ultimately
excised version, a grey-haired Sam reads stories of his adventures to his
children, spinning them tales of wizards and orcs and walking trees. There
is even the faint suggestion that Sam has been narrating the story of The
Lord of the Rings itself, before, at last, we depart the Shire for good,
leaving Sam and Rose in a state of connubial bliss, tale-telling by the
fireside.
What stopped Tolkien from publishing this ending was his membership of the
Inklings – that renowned circle of Oxford writers and academics who met
for seventeen years from 1932 and which counted C. S. Lewis, Charles
Williams and E. R. Edison, the author of The Worm Ouroboros, among their
number. It was they who pointed out the glutinous sentimentality of the
scene, marshalling their forces to argue that it added nothing of
substance to a narrative which had already swollen far beyond the "second
Hobbit" requested by his publishers. 
Glyer suggests that this incident typifies the way in which the Inklings
affected one another's work, despite the fact that in later years its
members were frequently to insist that their meetings acted more as a
social club than a writers' circle, brushing aside any suggestion of real
influence.
Tolkien and Lewis formed the spine of the Inklings, regularly convening to
read and discuss one another's work in Lewis's rooms at Magdalen College.
There were nineteen members in all, and Glyer excels at depicting their
world, with its petty rivalries, joshing honesty ("he is ugly as a
chimpanzee", wrote Lewis of fellow Inkling Charles Williams), its wit and
learning and championship of scholarship for its own sake. The Inklings
were often supportive and sympathetic ("the inexhaustible fertility of the
man's imagination amazes me", wrote Lewis in 1949 on receipt of another
instalment of The Lord of the Rings), but were capable of ferocious
criticism if it was felt that a member had done anything less than his
best ("You can do better than that. Better Tolkien, please!"). Tempers
must surely have become frayed at times – as Tolkien became unyieldingly
critical of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia ("about as bad as can be") or as
the English don Hugo Dyson met the latest bulletin from Middle Earth by
(according to Tolkien's son Christopher) "lying on the couch, and lolling
and shouting and saying, ‘Oh God, no more Elves’".
Not that all of them were ever present at the Magdalen reading meetings:
often no more than six or seven would turn up, while the rest preferred to
save themselves for the more raucous social gatherings in the Oxford pub
The Eagle and Child. Inkling James Dundas-Grant recalls a typical scene: 
"we sat in a small back room with a fine coal fire in winter . . . . back
and forth the conversation would flow. Latin tags flying around. Homer
quoted in the original to make a point . . . . Tolkien jumping up and
down, declaiming in Anglo-Saxon."
Endearingly eccentric though this might sound, the group have been accused
of cliquey provincialism, of being hermetically sealed in their nook at
"The Bird and Baby" from those evolutions which were occurring in the
wider world of literature. John Wain, a former pupil of Lewis's and an
occasional Inkling himself, wrote a hostile account of the group in 1962,
stating that they were "politically conservative, not to say reactionary;
in religion . . . in art, frankly hostile to any manifestation of the
'modern' spirit". The surviving Inklings were outraged, but some of Wain's
criticisms seem difficult to repudiate. Here, for example, is Lewis
lampooning T. S. Eliot:
For twenty years I've stared my level best 
To see if evening – any evening – would
suggest 
A patient etherised upon a table; 
In vain. I simply wasn’t able.
Yet this mistrust of modernity was part of the group's essential spirit.
Most of the Inklings were veterans of the Trenches and had little cause to
applaud a world descending once again into conflict. The image that
Glyer's expert account will sometimes conjure up, of ageing scholars
swapping tales with a pint of ale in hand, seems tellingly familiar –
reminiscent of a convocation of hobbits back from the war and living out
their days in comfort in the Shire. Small wonder that Tolkien, who
declared himself to be "a Hobbit in all but size", was so attached to that
sentimental ending, with its cosy domesticity and its bedtime stories by
the fire. 
---------------------
-- 
questo articolo e` stato inviato via web dal servizio gratuito 
http://www.newsland.it/news
 segnala gli abusi ad 
ab...@newsland.it

 community"
Sembra molto interessante.
Grazie della segnalazione.
Gwindor
-- 
"I used to pray so hard for God to send me a new bicycle.  Then I realised
  he doesn't work that way, so I stole one and prayed for forgiveness."
Bill Taylor
Togli REMOVEME dall'indirizzo per rispondere