Jrr Tolkien is no longer the subject of an ostracism on the part of the researchers. The fact that the Lord of the Rings was a bookstore success, then a cinematographic juggernaut, did not flee academics, quite the contrary. In turn, I. Pantin offers a sum of scholarship and reflection that does not lack charm.
The Tolkian character even intrigues academics. Author of two bestsellers, the Hobbit in 1937 and the Ringspublished in three volumes between 1954 and 1955, he was one of the founders of the fantasypopular genre which inherits both certain types of characters – in particular elves and orcas – and a particular mode of writing, tinged with medieval nostalgia and fascination for invented languages. But Tolkien is also known to be a linguist, philologist, teacher at Oxford (Pembroke College, then Merton College) and specialist in Anglo-Saxon medieval literature. This is apparently a big gap which would already be enough to arouse curiosity.
All the disciplines that have been linked to literature therefore passed Tolkien to the reel. Text genetics specialists took advantage of the mass of documents published by his son Christopher Tolkien under the collective title History of Middle Earthunder translation into French at Christian Bourgois, and the supporters of the Whichnforschung were able to examine his sources and what he had taken from it, as in the recent collective work published by Léo Carruthers under the title Tolkien and the Middle Ages. Linguists and philologists in particular gave it to heart, Tolkien having invented not only a vocabulary, but coherent language systems, of which he exposed in appendices and glossaries the subtleties and the difficulties, in a slightly pastiche Crazy where the writer pretended to forget that of these languages he was the inventor to better study them as linguist, hesitations and assumptions in support. From fields more external to literary creation also came from the interpreters of Tolkien, allegorists and symbolists who identified themes of Christian inspiration, such as the quest or the struggle of good and evil, even specialists in Freudian or Jungian psychoanalysis , or adapters of Dumézilian trifunctionality. Historians of literary genres have finally used the material delivered by Tolkien himself, in particular in We Fairy Storiesto interpret with a certain self -vein the work and the imagination of its author.
What could Isabelle Pantin do with this new work on Tolkien ? Gather the two sides of the character, the professional of medieval literature and the writer, to seek the unity of the person and the human coherence of the Tolkien character. Not only bring new details, new tracks, but also propose, with attractive strength and simplicity, a general reflection on the Tolkian object, not as a work or as a man, but as an object of study. Isabelle Pantin practices in her work a literary analysis of Tolkien, of all Tolkien.
It even does more than practicing it: it claims, justifies it and imposes it. Literary analysis, far from being an archaism, a pure play of the mind or a critical exercise detached from its object, is revealed under its pen for what it is: a conceptual tool which is nourished by sociology, of ‘Anthropology and history and which is interested in a cultural fact – almost a total social fact -, literature. Following Tom Shippey in Great Britain, Verlyn Flieger in the United States, Vincent Ferré in France, and a few others, Isabelle Pantin draws a portrait of Tolkien in his work which is also an opportunity for a reflection on literature and reading. Tolkien and his legendsit’s also What does it mean “ read Tolkien.
With efficiency, Isabelle Pantin dismisses some false tracks, fallacious and easy polemical interpretations. In particular, Tolkien’s supposed racism is reinterpreted in an enlightening comparison with the theories of A. Rosenberg: If Tolkien is racist, it is in the sense of XIXe century, not XXe century, in a vision of man based on personal nobility, and not on genetics. If there is a fascination for a “ spirit of the North “, It is for a” mindset “, And not for a people. Other comparisons are made, by which Tolkien’s affinities are taking shape, his intellectual inheritances and his friendships or enmities. Cs Lewis obviously occupies a place of choice in this table, both because of the personal ties which united him to Tolkien and for his own works (the Narnia World) and for the theoretical debates that this aroused between Tolkien and him. Less known to French readers, O. Barfield (Poetic diction1928), Ch. Williams, for whom Tolkien wrote his We Fairy StoriesAnd Jw Dunnes (An Experiment With Timeread in the 3e 1934 edition) also provide dating points as well as disagreement.
Some of these comparisons are expected, others are a surprise. In any case, they have never agreed, because they lead I. Pantin to draw the lineaments of an author who thought about his own writing processes and justified certain peculiarities. Tolkien is not a sweet dreamer, producer of a contemporary mythology – too easy expression which hides serious difficulties -, he is not a nostalgic and romantic linguist – curious combination for whom frequent linguists -, he takes up His rights and is envisaged for what he is, a writer, writing, whose ambiguities are recognized at the very heart of his act of writing.
Under the pen of i. Pantin, the literary themes cease to be a catalog of items frozen by the school tradition, a pre-established and placed list on the work that we are thus adapting or dissolving: they touch the ‘Writing as imagination, in his relationship with his reader. It is not without a certain empathy with Tolkien that I. Pantin defines a “ mythical writing From Tolkien. It is mythical almost in the etymological sense, where mythos Designates an assertive word: the pleasure of the story is what matters to Tolkien, which thus revives an ideal of writing which had ceased to be fashionable in its time. It is also mythical in the sense that Tolkien proclaims his attachment to the heroic legend, and refuses to define for his work a single meaning, wanted and organized by the author. This last point is particularly important, because it was strictly affirmed by Tolkien himself in his correspondence: in his letter n ° 131, addressed around 1951 to Milton Waldman, publisher at Collins, where he summarizes the project of the project Silmarillionhe asserts a vigorous “ I Dislike Allegory Which defines both his ambition as a writer and his particular posture.
From this point, the bases were laid for an appreciation of Tolkien’s work, rather than a criticism or a analysis, that is to say a learned reading that has taste. I. Pantin is in detail, while also giving those who do not know Tolkien well the means to follow it. She thus recalls the divisions in Tolkien’s work, between the Hobbit and the Rings on the one hand, and what is traditionally called Legendarium on the other, namely the different versions and projects that have fueled Tolkien’s publications without being published during his lifetime. But it offers new excursus, sometimes surprising, even confusing, for which we would have liked to have more pages-the book seems to have been brutally shortened in certain places, perhaps for editorial concern. The parallels thati. Pantin traces with the Peter Ibbetson de George du Maurier (1892) and the Sense of the Past by Henry James (1917), or with the Last Mohicansfrom Fenimore Cooper (1826), would benefit from being extended or amplified. The comparison with the Greek tragedy, or in any case the resumption of terms of Greek origin to qualify the tragedy (Hamartia), would also ask to be specified.
The last chapters alone deserves to be interested in this work, as they bring new in the analysis of Tolkian equipment: I. Pantin looks at the cards inserted in the works of Tolkien, which have become a snapshot Both of Middle -earth (we find one in tribute in the second cinematographic part of Peter Jackson’s trilogy, The Two Towersin a scene with Faramir) and an appendix almost obliged in all the works of fantasy contemporary. Inserting such cards, however, was not easy for Tolkien, who first conceived them as a work tools, and non -reading instruments. Above all, the discrepancies they have in relation to the plot that they are supposed to illustrate shows, in the case of Tolkien, both their origin foreign to the act of writing and the possibility of a parallel reading and particular.
Bringing together all the wires, I. Pantin offers, from the example of these cards, a modeling of both Tolkien’s writing and the author’s relationship with his work and his imagination. In the abundance of the appendages, cards, versions rejected or abandoned during training, on the sidelines of the main narrative flow, it detects an organization of the particular world, a cosmogony which redoubles the Cosmogonic Shark by Tolkien, a geography that underlies and Enriches both the geography of the environment of the environment and the language geography of metaphors and images specific to Tolkien. In a few pages, the inner world of Tolkien is drawn, a spatial and temporal architecture on which he has set up a writing process which has become a literary world, “ The image of an isolated world like an infinite island, dug with abysses, trained in a dangerous history, and traveled with paths, some of which are going out of nowhere (P. 246). One of the most beautiful definitions I know of Tolkien, one of the fairest too.
That this fresh wind is brought by a seasoned academic, professor of literature compared to the École normale supérieure on rue d’Ulm, should not surprise: I. Pantin is proof that university criticism knows how to renew itself, evolve, without Care of modes and foucades, watchwords and injunctions from outside. She knows how to impose a fair look at what is essential, the act of writing, by avoiding the splendid almost autistic isolation which makes the author the source and the culmination of her work. The work finds its place in a balance between production and reception, where the act of reading turns out to be the necessary complement of the act of writing.