Tolkien e Lewis

[Ilmarinen]

Sério que o Tolkien deu uma evitada no kra pq ele casou com uma mulher divorciada?

Ahá... bem que eu desconfiava disso ( o biógrafo do Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter, devia, pelo menos, ter dado alguma notícia disso na biografia oficial de 1977.

De acordo com a nova biografia do Lewis, ESSE daí é que era, aparentemente, o VERDADEIRO motivo pro Tolkien não ir com a cara da Joy Davidman... Parece que vários dos amigos de Lewis, com certo fundamento, achavam que ela era interesseira, que, sendo dezesseis anos mais nova que ele, havia enredado o Lewis pra conseguir a cidadania britânica depois do divórcio dela e que, ainda por cima, nutria intenções financeiras em relação ao patrimônio do Lewis adquirido antes do casamento (que, na verdade, nem era realmente dele ), brigando com a filha do relacionamento anterior dele por causa de uma propriedade que era da mãe dela, então amante do Lewis:

After Mrs Moore’s death, quarrels between her daughter and Lewis’s wife about the ownership of The Kilns support the view held by many of Lewis’s friends that Joy Davidman was a mercenary gold-digger. The overall picture the biography presents of its hero’s relations with women is not an imposing one. After being in thrall for two decades to a woman some twenty-five years his senior, Lewis was then entrapped by a woman sixteen years his junior. Undoubtedly he came in the end to love his wife – but at the cost of losing most of his friends.

Eis a opinião desse biógrafo recente do Lewis a respeito dos motivos pro afastamento de Tolkien e CSL:

The friendship between Lewis and Tolkien cooled as the years progressed. Why did Tolkien’s views about Lewis darken?
The relationship between Lewis and Tolkien was of major importance to both throughout the 1930s and into the early 1940s. The cooling seems to have taken place mainly on Tolkien’s side, reflecting three issues. The first was what seems to have been jealousy on Tolkien’s part about the growing influence that the novelist Charles Williams had on Lewis in the early 1940s. This was alleviated somewhat with Williams’s death in 1945. The second emerged in the early 1950s, when Tolkien began to suspect that Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia borrowed some of his own ideas without due acknowledgment. Third, Tolkien regarded Lewis’s views of marriage as inadequate and was dismayed by Lewis marrying a divorcée and hurt by the fact that Lewis failed to tell him about it. In any case, Tolkien cordially detested Joy personally. Yet Lewis always respected and admired Tolkien. One of my discoveries in researching this biography was a hitherto unknown letter in which Lewis proposed Tolkien for the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature, which clearly reflects this high regard.

 

[Ilmarinen]

Recomendo a leitura pra quem estiver interessado nos Contrastes e Confrontos dos dois literatos: Tolkien e C.S. Lewis

Conflict and Convergence on Fundamental Matters
in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien
Ralph C. Wood, Baylor University, Waco, Texas
(published in Renascence)

 

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