Libreria Feltrinelli - Corso Aldo Moro 3, Varese
Thursday, January 22 - 18:00
Presentation of the book: The transmission of
thought and numbering of the Elves of JRR Tolkien
(Ed Marietti 1820)
Participants:
- Roberto Fontana, president of the Ass. Rivendell or culturally and member of the translators of the work;
- Alberto Ladavas , a member of the Tolkien Society, the Scientific Committee of the series "Tolkien and surroundings" (Marietti 1820) and the work of the team of translators;
- Frank Manfredi, a journalist of "La Provincia" of Varese.
The secret vice of Tolkien
No prudery for the great Professor Oxford: Like all Tolkien fans already know, the secret vice of the author of The Hobbit , Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion was just (so to speak) to invented languages. Such was the love of Tolkien for this task, let us not forget that he was a professor of philology, who in a letter written immediately after the publication of The Lord of the Rings said: "At the root is the invention of languages . The "stories" were created to provide a world language and not to the contrary. [...] For me, in fact, [The Lord of the Rings ] Is primarily a test of "linguistic aesthetic ', as they sometimes say to people who ask me" what is? "(Letter No. 165). Although this statement was a true declaration of precedence on the narrative of linguistics, Tolkien complained that few people take him seriously: "Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language that goes along with my own aesthetic principles seem real. But it's true. "(Letter No. 205).
However, someone may ask: what has this to do with transmission of thought and the numbering of the Elves ? Well, the work in question is the translation of a series of essays written by Tolkien between 1959 and 1960 and then published in the journal American Vinyar Tengwar not been included in the powerful body of exegesis consists of Tolkien History of Middle-earth . Though the stated objective of all these writings is the philological-linguistic, ie to explain the meaning of specific terms in different languages \u200b\u200bEldarin and their mutual relationships and dependencies, the author is not confined to a barren and empty list of words Quenya, Sindarin and Telerin nor a statement of cold-philological syntactic rules. As in the style of Tolkien, from each term comes a new story is in addition to its composite legendarium, or author draws on episodes in the histories already published details and to add language known only to the appearance, because it is the analysis of these records that is sometimes able to interpret passages in other works.
And so the analysis of terms such as ósanwe , kenta , fea , hroa , Nira , lata, patha sama takes place and the wonderful explanation of how all sentient beings can communicate mentally with each other, since higher of all, Eru, to the mortal man, going through the lies invented by the enemy, Melkor, to ensnare the latter. From the notes on hours, but we are familiar with the inner mind of the Elves, in which generarno deep feelings and real and perceived in the soul that counts and that sometimes come indirectly through the Valar by Eru.
Finally, how can we not admire the creative genius of Tolkien, when, to be able to explain the origins and ties of the Elvish words for different parts of the hand, manages to invent and narrate the children's games in which elves transform your fingers into families giving them cute pet names? Or when Tolkien did not simply record that mátengwie means "sign language", but described it with such mastery that we can reproduce these gestures with illustrations?
The essays in this volume are therefore not only of the splendid examples of Tolkien's mastery of philology and linguistics, material, therefore, of great interest to those studying the Elvish languages, but they become fully part of the baggage information and stories left by the Oxford Professor of Middle-earth and help us to shed more light on this fascinating and still partly unexplored subcreation.
addition of course the immense pleasure of reading, once again, a new work Tolkien.
(R. Fontana, A. Ladavas)
