In the 25 years since Tolkien's death in September 1973, millions have read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion and become fascinated about the very private man behind the books. It is a mistaken thing to do anyway, either useless (when applied to the stupid) or pernicious (when inflicted on the gifted).’ But when he wrote The Hobbit he was still suffering from what he later called ‘the contemporary delusions about “fairy-stories” and children’ – delusions that not long afterwards he made a conscious decision to renounce. The original authorised biography, and the only one written by an author who actually met J.R.R. ‘I am not interested in the “child” as such, modern or otherwise, and certainly have no intention of meeting him/her half way, or a quarter of the way. ‘Never mind about the young!’ he once wrote. He later removed many of these, but some remain in the published text – to his regret, for he came to dislike them, and even to believe that any deliberate talking down to children is a great mistake in a story. Indeed he did this too consciously and deliberately at times in the first draft, which contains a large number of ‘asides’ to juvenile readers, remarks such as ‘Now you know quite enough to go on with’ and ‘As we shall see in the end’. Despite the fact that it had been drawn into his mythology, Tolkien did not allow it to become overwhelmingly serious or even adult in tone, but stuck to his original intention of amusing his own and perhaps other people’s children.
0 kommentar(er)
