... (Tolkien) s'est efforcé de négocier pour que le Silmarillion et Le SdA soient publiés ensemble - "like one long narrative journey" - mais les manuscrits du Silmarillion n'étaient pas en bon ordre ni assez consistants "with their sequel".
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En fait, je ne suis pas sûre pour les nuances de vocabulaire, alors plutôt que de transcrire un texte en "franglais" (horrible à lire!) je préfère tout donner en Anglais :\
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Tolkien was unsuccessful in playing Collins against Allen & Unwin, and so The LotR was issued alone. Afterwards, revision of the many competing, inconsistent, experimental narratives of The Silmarillion to a single authoritative version may have seemed like a step backwards in more ways than one - though he spent a lot of time expanding the annals, genealogies, cartographies, and etymologies of his fourteen invented languages; in other words, his revisions often accentuate historical divergence and accidence rather than mythological unity.
Eighteen years went by between the publication of The LotR and Tolkien's death, and while he manages to produce some long-expected scholarly projects, his capacity to bring his longer literary projects to completion seemed short-circuited. He started a sequel, "The New Shadow", but soon abandoned it; after the destruction of the greater demons of the Ring, Aragorn's regime "would contain no tales worth recounting" (J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters, 419). The valedictory Smith of Wootton Major is the only work of literature Tolkien completed susequently, and it nostagically glances through Tolkien's central themes from a graceful distance (Helms, Tolkien's World, 118-25).
However, no mastery is possible in Smith's Faery; the landscape is too surreal, projectional, and expansive even for its attempt, and Smith gives up his imaginative star with a melancholy sense both of benison and defeat. In a 1967 letter to Roger Lancelyn Green (who reviewed it), Tolkien himself dscribes Smith as "an old man's book, already weighted with the presage of "bereavement" " (Letters, 388).
Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien's excellent biographer, writes of Tolkien's awareness during his last years of "a perpetual discontinuity , a breaking of threads in his work which delayed achievement and frustated him more and more" (Carpenter, Biography, 240).
In a letter dated a month before his death, Tolkien thanks a generous reader, Lord Halsbury, for the warmth of his appreciation and the offer of his future help with manuscripts, writing of his own seeming inability to finish, "Over and above all the afflictions and obsacles I have endured since The LotR came out, I have lost confidence" (Letters, 431).
This may have paradoxically resulted from his dazzling success and his depression at his cult status. But I think also that Tolkien's war-driven, slf-questioning investigation of the uses of mythology had brought him to a point with no energy to move forward and yet had worn away at the enabling presuppositions for going back... " _________________________________________________________________________
... et c'est pas fini! Il reste encore deux gros paragraphes... pour la prochaine fois :)
Je suis vraiment désolée que cette grosse tartine soit en anglais :\ j'espère que ça ne va pas trop vous dégoûter :]
Feuille