Tolkien et la guerre

[jerome]

En marge de son oeuvre romanesque, Tolkien a fait l'objet du dernier livre de Sir Martin Gilbert. Un livre dans lequel il revient sur les discussions qu'il a eu avec l'auteur du Seigneur des Anneaux sur son expérience de la première guerre mondiale, que Tolkien a faite en tant que soldat.

Je vous mets le début d'un article qui lui est consacré :

"J.R.R. Tolkien and the Somme were inextricably linked. I learned this forty-four years ago, shortly after I was elected to my first university appointment, at Merton College, Oxford. I was twenty-six years old.

In those days there was a strict seating order at college dinners. The head of the college sat in the centre, the senior fellows on either side of him, and the junior fellows at the far ends of the table. Also at the ends were the Emeritus Fellows, long retired, venerable, sometimes garrulous guardians of the college name. Several of them had served in the First World War. When they discovered a historian, new to his craft, filled with the keenness of a youngster amid his elders, they were happy to talk about those distant days, already more than forty years in the past.

Some enjoyed singing the songs of the trenches, in versions far ruder than those sung today. Tolkien was more reticent, yet when he did open up, full of terrible tales. There was never any boasting. The war's scars were too many, its reality too grim, to lead to self-glorification, or even to embellishment."

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