摘要：The Fall of Gondolin, J.R.R. Tolkien, ed Christopher Tolkien, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 304pages Though he very rarely talked about his service in the First World War--his silence most likely the result of survivor's guilt, something he shared with most of his post-war friends--J.R.R. Tolkien said that his invented worlds really took form in "army huts, crowded, filled with the noise of gramophones." The war, he realized in hindsight, had forced him to imagine a beauty and wonder beyond the brutal life of the trenches. Because of Tolkien's adamant rejection of formal allegory in his own writings, many of his greatest supporters denied for years that any passage (or passages) in The Lord of the Rings had anything to do with the war itself, at least directly. As early as the 1950s, however, Tolkien's good friend, C.S. Lewis, was challenging this view, (he had also gone through the war, a volunteer despite being Irish). Though Lewis remembered the fonder parts of it in his autobiography, especially the friendships he formed, the first bullet that flew past his head roused him to think, "This is war. This is what Homer wrote about." No doubt the two survivors had talked innumerable times--privately--about their own experiences in the war. In his praising review of Tolkien's trilogy, Lewis wrote that the battle scenes have "the very quality of the war my generation knew. It is all here: the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet on the front when 'everything is now ready,' the lying civilians, the lively, vivid friendships, the background of something like despair and the merry foreground, and such heaven-sent windfalls as a cache of choice tobacco 'salvaged' from a ruin.
