[American] Dan Muroshi / Wen Fu Yue / Translation
Professor Dan Muroshi's "Eighty Books Around the World" is both a reconstruction of the territory of world literature and the establishment of a palace of memory on paper for human culture. When the virus was circulating, some people read and wrote at their desks, lit lamps for heaven and earth, and gave the world a hope.
Week 16 Day 5
London J. R. R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings
Today, we are returning to England in our eightieth book, and this summer trip has come to an end (I will write another afterword later when we reunite at the Improvement Club). For our grand finale, The Lord of the Rings seems to be the perfect choice. There are several reasons for this: as a fascinating narrative of an epic quest, "there and back again" (echoing the subtitle of The Hobbit); as a book closely related to books (and manuscripts, stories, and legends); as the twentieth century, and perhaps the most popular novel ever, The Lord of the Rings has sold 150 million copies to date; as a post-World War II work born of the trauma of World War I; and, Personally, among the books that accompanied me throughout my adolescence, it was my most precious book, and as I re-read and lectured on it, it never stopped revealing new dimensions.
Like Saul Bellow's Africa, Tolkien's Middle-earth is a completely fictional realm that is inextricably linked to our own world. Instead of showing witches invading our everyday world, as In Wrinkles of Time does, Tolkien took the opposite strategy: he created a vast world of imaginary creatures inhabited by humans who were just one of many races. One of Tolkien's brilliant ideas was to set his heroes as hobbits, who roamed freely, unrestricted, with furry feet, and traveled through every kingdom. They looked just like the British. The Hobbits, however, were not human at all, and outside of their remote homeland of Eriador, they had to navigate the wider world.
Like Loftin, Inge, and Lewis Carroll before them, Tolkien relied on the child's ability to easily enter the illusion: once the parrot taught the doctor all the animal language, or Alice jumped down the rabbit hole, they entered the fantasy kingdom. But Tolkien also set himself a different task for The Lord of the Rings: He wanted to make his fantasy world believable to adults, and Tolkien's work now lays out among the classical literature that Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight once cherished, edited, and taught. Tolkien's work is inextricably linked to his research in linguistics and classical literature, especially Old English literature. His most remarkable academic achievement was the study of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, which was translated into modern English. There is also a series of studies and translations of the legendary poetry of King Arthur, including the first rhyming poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight". ）
Tolkien's novels are rooted in a threefold world he experienced throughout his life: a citizen of a country afflicted by successive world wars; a Catholic; and a scholar of medieval language and literature. The trilogy centers on an epoch-making world war, and while Tolkien always less convincingly denies that his story has any connection to World War II, he does admit that it has anything to do with the traumatic experiences of World War I. He fought in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and by the end of the war, almost all of his close friends had died in the trenches. After retiring from the army in 1917 and returning to England, Tolkien began conceiving his own magnificent fantasy world, working on a manuscript with a resonant title: The Book of Lost Tales. (Translator's Note: The Lost Legend is the first two volumes of the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-Earth, containing an early version of Tolkien's myth of Middle-Earth, written during World War I.) ）
The Lord of the Rings is also a work with a strong sense of religion, although not as obvious as Wrinkles of Time. Tolkien didn't try to transplant his Catholic doctrine directly into his world, but if you really throw a piece of Elven Lambas, you can hit a christian figure: Aragorn, son of sorrow, who refers to Jesus in religious scriptures, in Isaiah 53:3), Gandalf, who rose from the dead to a white robe, and Frodo, a teenager who was ready to choose self-sacrifice to save the world. Crucially, Frodo was able to resist the temptation to rise to power, and the compassion Frodo showed when Gollum tried to murder him to steal the ring he lost to Bilbo in The Hobbit. When Gandalf told him that Sauron's minions were now searching for the Ring in the Shire, the subject had its first foreshadowing.
"It's horrible!" Frodo shouted, "This is much worse than the worst I can imagine from your hints and warnings!" Oh Gandalf, my best friend, what should I do? Now I'm really scared. What am I going to do? When Bilbo had the opportunity, he didn't stab that despicable guy with a sword, what a shame! ”
"Pity? It is the heart of 'pity' that makes his men merciful—compassion, and tolerance, and never kill if it is necessary. And he was rewarded handsomely. Frodo, you know, the reason why he was not harmed by evil and was able to escape was precisely because of the way he first obtained the Ring of Mercy. (Translator's note: The original text of the novel quoted in this article is from the translation co-translated by Deng Jiawan, Shi Zhongge, and Du Yunci)
Gandalf was a wise man in the image of Christ and the leader of the Interspecies—interdenominational—Fellowship of the Ring, but he was also a veiled self-portrait of its creator. Crucially, by deciphering long-forgotten documents from the Minas Tirith Royal Library, Gandalf unraveled the mystery of Bilbo's Lord of the Rings. As he stated at the Council of Elrond, the library holds "many records that today few even learned people can read, because the writings and languages are difficult and obscure for future generations of humanity." There, Gandalf discovers a forgotten scroll that reveals to him the lost history of how the Rings fell into Gollum's hands. I wonder why he didn't stay a few more years before he could have made a review.
Tolkien's creation of the Middle-earth world began with language and writing. We can see this on the title page, such as the mysterious runes and elven words that it highlights. On the title page of my book, I have deciphered these inscriptions, and I have borrowed Tolkien's all-encompassing appendix, which provides tables of great help.
It turns out that these words are not from foreign languages, but from transliterated English. They reveal that the book is actually a translation of a history book, written by the character Bilbo Baggins, created by Tolkien, in the dialect of his hometown. In the first chapter, he tells Gandalf that he will leave the Shire to find "a place where I can finish my writing." I have already thought of a wonderful ending to it: from then on, he lived his life happily and happily." Gandalf laughed and responded, "But no matter how this book ends, no one will read it." Bilbo retorted that Frodo had already read it. Frodo was forced to give Bilbo all the information about the saga that was going on, and he even had to finish The Red Book of Westmarch himself. So Frodo was both the first reader of the book and its ultimate author.
In Utopia, Thomas More provides him with an "alternative world" of history, a map, and even a page of the alphabet to show utopia. Tolkien also provided us with maps and alphabets; the 1966 British edition included a two-color map that could be opened as an end-of-book fold, designed to resemble the map that accompanied nineteenth-century traveler's travelogues:
However, Tolkien created the whole world beyond the pages of the novel, and he far surpassed More (and probably more than any writer from before and after). Thomas More was unable to speak in utopian language to save his own life, while Tolkien invented the elven language in the true sense of the word, a non-existent but functional language. In an article titled "A Secret Vice," Tolkien describes the elven language as "endlessly compelling in terms of privacy and particularly shy individualism"—a language that no one but him could speak.
Tolkien based the trilogy on the massive volumes of manuscripts he had spent decades writing, so he was able to depict fully realized "sub-creations" or "secondary worlds" in a purely realistic way. He used these terms in a lecture when he began writing The Lord of the Rings in 1939, which was essentially a manifesto—On Fairy-stories, an important treatise by Tolkien on his theory of fantasy literature, born out of his 1939 lecture at the University of St Andrew's, which laid out the definition, traceability, function, and highest value of the concept of "Wonderland." Core terms such as "sub-creation" and "second world" come from this article. Tolkien called the world created by God "The Primary World", and the wonderland created by the opposite man as a "Sub-Creator" is "The Secondary World"). In the article, he refuted Colütte's romantic concept of "willing suspension of disbelief", from the fourteenth chapter of Biographia Literaria, colücke explored the supernatural to give people a sense of natural reality, mostly quoted by later fantasy writers and scholars, referring to the reader's logical suspension of reality in reading fantasy texts. Voluntarily believing in fantasy elements that seem unconvincing in everyday life, Amberto Echo described it in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods as a necessary agreement between the reader and the author. Tolkien had a different view of fictional conventions. He considers the so-called "voluntary suspension of suspicion",
In my opinion, this is not a valid description of what happened. In essence, the storyteller presents himself as a successful "sub-creator." He created a second world into which your mind can enter. What he says is "real"; it conforms to the laws of that world. So no matter where you are, as long as you live in it, you are willing to believe it all. When doubt arises, the spell is broken; magic, or art, loses its effect.
In Tolkien's view, we must only suspend our doubts when the writer is out of standard, "which is the excuse we use when we accommodate games and pretends." Instead of wanting us to smile at the dwarfs who make toys, Tolkien put his books side-by-side with teenage novels on the shelves, or read them without serious emotional or moral involvement. He was committed to creating a world that was entirely believable, though not trying to rival God's creation, as Byron or Joyce did: therefore, the Middle-earth world was a secondary creation, not to be confused with ourselves. In the Middle-earth world, "real" people like Aragon and Boromir befriend semi-real people (hobbits), as well as "real" fairy tale characters (elves, dwarves, wizards), and whole creatures that are fabricated (Oak, Ente, Ring). Together, these characters build a world into which we can enter whimsically without forgetting that we are in a fictional story world that will awaken and guide our moral empathy.
In the end, evil is self-inflicted, but at the moment of its demise, it will take the courage and perseverance of Frodo and his companion Sam Gamgee to complete this decisive journey and enter the dark center of Mordor,000, causing Gollum to fall into the abyss of the destruction of the Lord of the Rings. That is, Felix culpa, at the last critical moment, by his pity and sparing a horse gollum snatched the ring, and then fell into the abyss of the volcano, indirectly completing the final task for the ring bearer). In the book's second chapter, The Shadow of the Past, an anxious Frodo says, "I wish this hadn't happened in my time." "So do I," said Gandalf, "and all the people of the world who are in the right place think this way, but they are not in charge." What we have to decide is only how to respond to the times we face. ”
We have traveled the globe with eighty books, and our own era in this plan has come to an end. In tribute to Phileas Fogg's strictly punctual conduct, I posted this article at 8:45 p.m. GMT, the same minute Voog strode back to the Improvement Club and won the bet, a journey that he completed – like Frodo, Bilbo and many of our protagonists – and back.
Editor-in-Charge: Ding Xiongfei
Proofreader: Yan Zhang