Oxonmoot

[Elendil]

C'est une mise en abyme très amusante des Inklings que fait Tolkien dans la première version des "Notion Club Papers" ; SD, p. 221 n. 52. Je mets ici l'original, puisqu'on peut supposer que l'anglais ne te pose pas de souci, mais diverses traductions informelles existent.

Tolkien a écrit :

Jeremy was our Lewis-expert, and knew all his works, almost by heart. Many in Oxford will still remember how he had, a year or two before, given some remarkable lectures on Lewis and Williams. People had laughed at the title, because Lewis and all that circle had dropped badly out of fashion. Old Bell-Tinker, who was still Chairman of the English Board then, had boggled and puffed at it. 'If you must touch such a subject,' he snorted, 'call it Lewis and cut it Short.'

Jeremy had retorted by offering to change the title to 'Lewis and Carolus or the Oxford Looking-glass'. 'Or "Jack and the Beanstalk", if you like,' he added, but that was too recondite a joke for the English Board. I believe, before Jeremy spoke up, few even of the Twentieth Century experts could have named any work of Williams, except perhaps The Octopus. That was still occasionally played, because of the great revival of missionary interest after the Far-eastern martyrdoms in the sixties.

The Allegory of Love was all of Lewis that the academicians ever mentioned (as a rule unread and slightingly). The other minor lights were only known by the few who read old C. R. Tolkien's little books of memoirs: In the Roaring Forties, and The Inns and Outs of Oxford. But Jeremy had made most of our club read some of those people (the Public-house School as it was called); though beside Jeremy only Ramer and Dolbear bothered with Tolkien père and all the elvish stuff.

Dans la version finale du texte (p. 201), il n'y a plus qu'un opuscule, anonyme de surcroit, paru en 1980 : In the Thirsty Forties, or the Inns and Outs of Oxford et Tolkien ne mentionne évidemment plus son "elvish stuff", puisque cela devient le sujet principal de la suite du texte.

A noter que le Notion Club Paper est lui-même une image des Inklings (avec diverses correspondances explicites imaginées au début par Tolkien) et qu'on y trouve encore "old Professor Rashbold at Pembroke", un "grumpy old bear", spécialiste de l'anglo-saxon et habile déchiffreur de codes (faut dire que ledit code était en fait en tengwar).

Avec tout ça (sans parler de Monsieur Merveille, des Lettres du Père Noël et de Roverandom, c'est assez stupéfiant que personne n'ait encore étudié en détail la question de la mise en abyme chez Tolkien...