5

This statement, misleadingly associated in Humphrey Carpenter’s biography with Tolkien’s undergraduate time at Oxford, does not appear in the manuscript draft of 1914–15, written while he was still a student and before he went to war. It thus comes out of a different context from the original talk with which Carpenter conflated it, and is all the more to be associated with Tolkien’s burgeoning idea of a ‘mythology for England’. The remark was Tolkien’s response to the myth-and-nationalism movement that spread through Western Europe and the British Isles in the 19th and early 20th centuries but had been brought to a halt by the 1914 war. Out of that pre-war movement came Wilhelm Grimm’s, Jacob Grimm’s, Jeremiah Curtin’s, Moe and Asbjørnsen’s, Lady Guest’s translation of the Welsh, in addition to Elias Lönnrot’s (1835) and expanded (1849) and a host of other myth and folklore collections.

Загрузка...