2023-11-15 08:41:36
Tolkien loved by the extreme right as well as by Lotta Continua; Tolkien great in literature but little studied in schools; Tolkien was passionate about Italy and linked to the Catholic Church but never visited Rome. It is the Tolkien described by Oronzo Cilli, interviewed by time.news; curator of the exhibition which opened today at Gnam, the National Gallery of Modern Art, in the presence among others of the Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, half a century after the death of the man of letters.
“The first three major exhibitions on Tolkien, in Oxford, Paris and Milwaukee in the USA, celebrated some aspects of the writer’s literary and academic work; the exhibition in Rome has the particularity of wanting to mainly tell the personality of ‘Tolkien: man , professor, author, as the title says”, is the peculiarity he underlined. “We want to make people understand how all three of these aspects were fundamental to the success that Tolkien then had throughout the world”, explains Cilli for whom the writer “is rightfully among the giants of literature”.
Yet, in high school we study little or nothing… “The problem of school programs is mainly due to the fact that we never get to study some periods and therefore some authors closest to us – he observes – And we focus above all on the authors Italians, except for some great international writers. There is not a full awareness of Tolkien’s literary greatness; but things, in this sense, are changing a bit within schools, many teachers talk about him today”.
Did the ‘Lord of the Rings’ film trilogy help make Tolkien famous in Italy and therefore also in the scholastic world? “It’s clear that the film has a different ‘language’ than the book. But we can say that they helped each other: the film is decided starting from the fame of Tolkien’s work which, after the trilogy at the cinema and on DVD and to TV series, has become even more popular.”
Is it a bit of a ‘Leopard’ effect, recalling the fame of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel amplified after the success of Luchini Visconti’s film? “Of course. And the fact that Tolkien and Tomasi share an episode comes to mind, having both been rejected by Elio Vittorini after being proposed to the Mondadori publishing house. The note is displayed in the exhibition.”
As for him, “I discovered Tolkien when I was 19, going into a bookshop with my girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife. And the size of the novel – he assures – never scared me, on the contrary: I was intrigued by the vastness of the characters it contained. My favorites – he confesses – are Gandalf and the two characters in one of Gollum and Smigol, with two different and sometimes opposite personalities”.
Politically conservative, fervent Catholic, his work is popular across the board but in some way he is often compared among the literary myths of the right, present in the Pantheon even of the most extreme: why? “Every reader is free to find his own sensibilities in an author. Tolkien is also great for this, for having created a world in which everyone can ‘appropriate’ a piece, even if it isn’t actually theirs – he replies – Suffice it to say that, if it is true that he was rejected in 1962 by Vittorini, his reading then became transversal: already in the Seventies, Tolkien was read and loved both by right-wing kids and for example by the Metropolitan Indians of Rome or by Lotta Continua … The certain thing is that Tolkien was outside of all these political schematisms.”
It is no coincidence that, after the ‘Bible’ and the ‘Quran’, the ‘Lord of the Rings’ is the most read book in the world, translated into 71 countries and 52 languages, including Gaelic and Latin… “Perhaps they are missing only ancient Greek and Aramaic!”, observes Cilli smiling. As for Latin, “he knew it and also had a very strong relationship with the Catholic Church, despite belonging geographically to the Anglican world: he was very Catholic, very close to the Franciscans and Dominicans and one of his sons became a priest of the Holy Roman Church”. A strong relationship with Italy too… “Certainly, he came to Italy on trips twice, to Venice and Assisi, as well as on a cruise; he also stayed there for a couple of weeks. But, strangely, he never visited Rome” . The ‘big ones’ always amaze…
(by Enzo Bonaiuto)
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