John Garth - Tolkien and the Great War

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «John Garth - Tolkien and the Great War» — ознакомительный отрывок электронной книги совершенно бесплатно, а после прочтения отрывка купить полную версию. В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Жанр: unrecognised, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Tolkien and the Great War: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Tolkien and the Great War»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

* TOLKIEN * Now a major motion picture *A biography exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s wartime experiences and their impact on his life and his writing of The Lord of The Rings.“To be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than in 1939 … by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”So J.R.R. Tolkien responded to critics who saw The Lord of the Rings as a reaction to the Second World War. Tolkien and the Great War tells for the first time the full story of how he embarked on the creation of Middle-earth in his youth as the world around him was plunged into catastrophe. This biography reveals the horror and heroism that he experienced as a signals officer in the Battle of the Somme and introduces the circle of friends who spurred his mythology to life. It shows how, after two of these brilliant young men were killed, Tolkien pursued the dream they had all shared by launching his epic of good and evil.John Garth argues that the foundation of tragic experience in the First World War is the key to Middle-earth’s enduring power. Tolkien used his mythic imagination not to escape from reality but to reflect and transform the cataclysm of his generatuion. While his contemporaries surrendered to disillusionment, he kept enchantment alive, reshaping an entire literary tradition into a form that resonates to this day.This is the first substantially new biography of Tolkien since 1977, meticulously researched and distilled from his personal wartime papers and a multitude of other sources.

Tolkien and the Great War — читать онлайн ознакомительный отрывок

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Tolkien and the Great War», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Tolkien and the Great War

The Threshold of Middle-earth

John Garth

Copyright HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF - фото 1

Copyright

HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.tolkien.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2003

Copyright © John Garth 2003

Previously unpublished material © The Tolkien Trust/The J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 2003

Cover: Tolkien and fellow students at Exeter College, Oxford, in June 1914

John Garth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN: 9780007373871

Version 2019-03-22

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

In memory of

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, 1892-1973

Christopher Luke Wiseman, 1893-1987

Robert Quilter Gilson, 1893-1916

Geoffrey Bache Smith, 1894-1916

TCBS

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chronology

Maps

Preface

PART ONE The immortal four

Prologue

ONE Before

TWO A young man with too much imagination

THREE The Council of London

FOUR The shores of Faërie

FIVE Benighted wanderers

SIX Too long in slumber

PART TWO Tears unnumbered

SEVEN Larkspur and Canterbury-bells

EIGHT A bitter winnowing

NINE ‘Something has gone crack’

TEN In a hole in the ground

PART THREE The Lonely Isle

ELEVEN Castles in the air

TWELVE Tol Withernon and Fladweth Amrod

Epilogue. ‘A new light’

Postscript. ‘One who dreams alone’

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Tolkien and The Great War

About the Publisher

Chronology

Tolkien on the Somme, 1916

6 June—Tolkien arrives in France.

28 June—He joins 11th Lancashire Fusiliers.

1 July—Battle of the Somme begins.

3 July—Tolkien reaches the frontline area.

6-8 July—With G. B. Smith in Bouzincourt.

14-16 July—Tolkien takes part in attack on Ovillers.

17 July—He learns of Rob Gilson’s death.

21 July—He becomes battalion signal officer.

24-30 July—Trenches at Auchonvillers.

7-10 August—Trenches east of Colincamps.

16-23 August—Signal officers’ course, Acheux.

22 August—Tolkien sees Smith for the last time.

24-26 August—Trenches, Thiepval Wood.

28 August-1 September—Trenches east of Leipzig Salient.

1-5 September—Support trenches near Ovillers.

12-24 September—Training, Franqueville.

27-29 September—Action at Thiepval Wood.

6-12 October—Battalion HQ, Ferme de Mouquet.

13-16 October—Headquarters, Zollern Redoubt.

17-20 October—Ovillers Post and Hessian Trench.

21-22 October—Capture of Regina Trench.

27 October—Tolkien reports sick at Beauval.

28 October—He leaves his service battalion.

29 October-7 November—In hospital, Le Touquet.

8 November—Returns to England on Asturias.

Maps

Preface This biographical study arose from a single observation how strange - фото 2 Preface This biographical study arose from a single observation how strange - фото 3

Preface

This biographical study arose from a single observation: how strange it is that J. R. R. Tolkien should have embarked upon his monumental mythology in the midst of the First World War, the crisis of disenchantment that shaped the modern era.

It recounts his life and creative endeavours during the years 1914-18, from his initial excursions into his first invented ‘Elvish’ language as a final-year undergraduate at Oxford, through the opening up of his horizons by arduous army training and then the horror of work as a battalion signal officer on the Somme, to his two years as a chronic invalid standing guard at Britain’s seawall and writing the first tales of his legendarium.

Travelling far beyond the military aspects of the war, I have tried to indicate the breadth and depth of Tolkien’s interests and inspirations. The growth of his mythology is examined from its first linguistic and poetic seeds to its early bloom in ‘The Book of Lost Tales’, the forerunner of The Silmarillion , envisaged in its beginnings as a compendium of long-forgotten stories of the ancient world as seen through elvish eyes. As well as a critical examination of this first foray into what Tolkien later came to call Middle-earth, I have provided commentaries on many of his early poems, one of which (‘The Lonely Isle’) appears here in full for the first time since its publication in the 1920s, in a small-press book now long out of print. I hope I have given Tolkien’s early poetry and prose the serious consideration they deserve, not as mere juvenilia, but as the vision of a unique writer in the springtime of his powers; a vision already sweeping in its scope and weighty in its themes, yet characteristically rich in detail, insight and life.

One of my aims has been to place Tolkien’s creative activities in the context of the international conflict, and the cultural upheavals which accompanied it. I have been greatly assisted, firstly, by the release of the previously restricted service records of the British Army officers of the Great War; secondly, by the kindness of the Tolkien Estate in allowing me to study the wartime papers that Tolkien himself preserved, as well as the extraordinary and moving letters of the TCBS, the circle of former schoolfriends who hoped to achieve greatness but found bitter hardship and grief in the tragedy of their times; thirdly, by the generosity of the family of Tolkien’s great friend Rob Gilson in giving me unrestricted access to all of his papers. The intertwined stories of Gilson, Geoffrey Bache Smith, Christopher Wiseman, and Tolkien – their shared or overlapping vision and even their sometimes incendiary disagreements – add greatly, I believe, to an understanding of the latter’s motivations as a writer.

Although Tolkien wrote often about his own wartime experiences to his sons Michael and Christopher, when they in their turn served in the Second World War, he left neither autobiography nor memoir. Among his military papers, a brief diary provides little more than an itinerary of his movements during active service in France. However, such is the wealth of published and archival information about the Battle of the Somme that I have been able to provide a detailed picture of Tolkien’s months there, down to scenes and events on the very routes he and his battalion followed through the trenches on particular days.

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «Tolkien and the Great War»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Tolkien and the Great War» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Отзывы о книге «Tolkien and the Great War»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Tolkien and the Great War» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x