Papers by Denis Bridoux
Note : ce texte fut initialement rédigé pour le projet Aubusson Tisse Tolkien, afin de fournir de... more Note : ce texte fut initialement rédigé pour le projet Aubusson Tisse Tolkien, afin de fournir des informations de base sur le sujet et de montrer l'importance des tapisseries dans l'esprit de Tolkien. Il s'adresse à des personnes qui n'ont pas ou peu de connaissances approfondies sur le Légendaire de l'auteur. Pour Tolkien, la plus noble expression de l'être humain, que ce soit sous sa forme Humanique ou Elfique, était la Créativité. Comme il en parle dans son poème Mythopoeia qui est aussi son manifeste, l'Homme, fait à l'image de son Créateur, est lui-même un Sub-Créateur. … L'Homme, sub-créateur, à travers lequel la lumière réfractée d'un simple blanc est en maints tons éclatée, et sans cesse combinée en formes vives qui, d'esprit en esprit, maints chemins décrivent. JRR Tolkien, Mythopoeia, l. 41-44, traduction Denis Bridoux Dans l'oeuvre de Tolkien, l'Art est exalté et valorisé sous toutes ses formes. Il est au centre de son Légendaire. L'univers tout entier doit son existence à une Grande Musique et les Valar, ou Puissances du Monde, en sont ses créateurs. Ils créent la substance même de la Terre, ses rochers, ses eaux, son air, ses arbres, plantes, animaux. Exprimant leur créativité naturelle, chacun à sa manière, ils donnent Réalité à la Vision qu'ils ont reçu de leur Musique, telle un bleu d'architecte. Le Vala Aulë, le Forgeron Divin crée sans cesse et, donnant généreusement les fruits de ses labeurs, sa créativité en est accrue d'autant. Son épouse Yavanna, la Donneuse de Fruits, peuple le monde de végétaux et de créatures. C'est elle qui de son chant, donne vie aux Deux Arbres Merveilleux, Telpérion et Laurelinn, qui éclairèrent plusieurs Âges durant les Terres Immortelles. La Valië Vairë, épouse de Mandos, qui est le Juge des Valar et le Gardien des esprits des Trépassés, couvre les murs de la demeure de son conjoint de tapisseries historiées qui récapitulent l'histoire du monde et de ses habitants. … De grands pouvoirs d'eux-mêmes ils tirèrent Et virent, regardant en arrière, les Elfes qui dans d'adroits ateliers de l'esprit forgeaient, Et qui ombre et lumière sur de secrets métiers entrecroisaient et tissaient.
Note: this text was initially written in French for the Aubusson Tisse Tolkien project, to provid... more Note: this text was initially written in French for the Aubusson Tisse Tolkien project, to provide background information on the subject and to show the importance of tapestries in Tolkien's mind. It is aimed at people who have little or no in-depth knowledge of his Legendarium. For Tolkien, the noblest expression of a human being, be they Mannish or Elven, was Creativity. As he wrote in his poem Mythopoeia which is also a personal manifesto, Man, made in the image of his Creator, is himself a Sub-Creator: … man, sub-creator, the refracted light through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Christopher Tollkien: a Commemoration, 2020
A remarkable man has died, all the more remarkable because he did what he did for another rather ... more A remarkable man has died, all the more remarkable because he did what he did for another rather than for his own self, purely out of filial duty. JRR Tolkien died September 2nd, 1973. Had his son Christopher not taken it upon himself to quit his successful career at Oxford University to ensure the gradual release into the daylight of much of his father's immeasurable wealth of unpublished material, whether it be Legendarium oriented or other texts and illustrations, and allowed key scholars to do so with his guidance, our love for his father's writings and our understanding of these would be much more restricted. Christopher Reuel 1 was one of his father's earliest collaborators and disciples. Albeit informally, his collaboration with his father began remarkably early, at about four or five years of age, when he commented on his father's inconsistency in changing the colour of Bilbo's front door and of Thorin's tassel during one of his readings of The Hobbit, which he was then writing in serial format. When The Hobbit was made ready for publication, Tolkien paid him for finding errors in the text as published. His feedback on The Lord of the Rings was invaluable to his father and, as chapters emerged one after the other, he was his father's first reader. At Inklings meetings, he took over reading his father's texts, as his elocution and delivery were much clearer than his father's. Later he redrew the maps of LotR for publication. A Fellow of New College, Oxford, and a Lecturer in Old and Middle English and Old Icelandic, Christopher had already established a solid reputation built on his collaboration with Nevill Coghill, another Inkling, on editions of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, Nun's Priest's Tale and Man of Law's Tale, and on his own edition of the Saga of King Heidrek the Wise. John Bowers, the author of the recent Tolkien's Lost Chaucer, made an apt comparison in the last chapter of his book between Chaucer's own son and Tolkien's, as both worked on the posthumous publications of their father's works. To him, Christopher's skills, seen through the prism of his notes to The Nun's Priest's Tale (1959), ideally prepared him to edit his father's works. Indeed, Christopher would soon apply the same exacting standards to his father's texts that he had acquired on editing centuries old ones.
Christopher Tolkien:une Commémoration, 2020
Un homme remarquable nous a quitté, d'autant plus remarquable qu'il a fait ce qu'il a fait pour u... more Un homme remarquable nous a quitté, d'autant plus remarquable qu'il a fait ce qu'il a fait pour un autre plutôt que pour lui-même, par pur devoir filial. J.R.R. Tolkien décéda le 2 septembre 1973. Si son fils et exécuteur testamentaire Christopher n'avait pas déterminé d'abandonner sa brillante carrière à l'université d'Oxford pour assurer l'émergence à la lumière du jour d'une grande partie de l'incommensurable richesse intellectuelle de son père en matière de documents inédits, que soient des textes ou des illustrations, liés à son légendaire ou à d'autres histoires indépendantes, des travaux académiques ou littéraires, des oeuvres originales ou des traductions, en prose et en vers, et s'il n'avait pas également confié à des chercheurs sélectionnés de le faire sous sa guidance, notre amour pour les travaux de son père et notre compréhension de ceux-ci seraient plus restreints d'autant. Christopher Reuel 1 fut l'un des premiers collaborateurs et disciples de son père. Bien qu'informelle, sa collaboration avec celui-ci commença remarquablement jeune, vers l'âge de quatre ou cinq ans, lorsqu'il commenta l'inconstance de son père qui avait changé la couleur de la porte d'entrée de Bilbo et du gland de capuchon de Thorïn lors d'une de ses lectures du Hobbit, qu'il leur contait alors par épisodes. Lorsque Le Hobbit fut préparé pour sa publication, Tolkien lui donna la tâche de trouver des coquilles dans le texte en le rémunérant deux pence par erreur. Ses commentaires sur Le Seigneur des Anneaux lui furent très précieux et, à mesure que les chapitres se succédaient, il en fut le premier lecteur, qui lui parvinrent parfois par la poste jusqu'en Afrique du Sud pendant la 2 ème Guerre Mondiale. Lors de réunions des Inklings, il prit graduellement la relève de son père pour lire ses textes, car son élocution et était beaucoup plus claire que le sien. Plus tard, il redessina les cartes du SdA pour les rendre publiables. Fellow du New College d'Oxford et maître de conférences en vieil et moyen anglais ainsi qu'en vieil islandais, Christopher s'était déjà forgé une solide réputation grâce à sa collaboration avec Nevill Coghill, un autre Inkling, sur les éditions de trois Contes de Canterbury de Geoffrey Chaucer, un auteur anglais du XIVème siècle, le Conte du Vendeur d'Indulgences, le Conte de l'Aumônier des Religieuses, et celui de L'Homme de Loi, et grâce à sa propre édition de la Saga du Roi Heidrek le Sage. John Bowers, l'auteur du récent Tolkien's Lost Chaucer, y fit une comparaison pertinente dans son dernier chapitre entre le propre fils de Chaucer et celui de Tolkien, puisque tous deux travaillèrent sur les publications posthumes des oeuvres de leurs pères respectifs, le premier pour publier son chef d'oeuvre Les Contes de Canterbury et le second la vaste quantité de textes mentionnés plus haut. Pour lui, les compétences de Christopher, vues à travers le prisme de la qualité de ses notes sur le Conte de l'Aumônier des Religieuses (1959), le préparaient idéalement à éditer les oeuvres de son père, notablement le Silmarillion, considéré impubliable sous sa forme existante, et sa monumentale édition de l'Histoire de la Terre du Milieu en 12 volumes. En effet, Christopher allait bientôt appliquer aux textes de son père les mêmes normes rigoureuses que celles qu'il avait acquises en éditant des textes vieux de plusieurs siècles.
Tolkien and Art, 2018
Note: this text was initially written in French for the Aubusson Tisse Tolkien project, to provid... more Note: this text was initially written in French for the Aubusson Tisse Tolkien project, to provide background information on the subject and to show the importance of tapestries in Tolkien's mind. It is aimed at people who have little or no in-depth knowledge of his Legendarium. For Tolkien, the noblest expression of a human being, be they Mannish or Elven, was Creativity. As he wrote in his poem Mythopoeia which is also a personal manifesto, Man, made in the image of his Creator, is himself a Sub-Creator: … man, sub-creator, the refracted light through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
If I had been told in September 1973, as I burst into tears upon reading about JRR Tolkien's deat... more If I had been told in September 1973, as I burst into tears upon reading about JRR Tolkien's death in Le Monde while on holiday with my parents, an author that I scarcely knew at all and this only through a children's book in French that, fewer than 10 years later, I would be studying his original artwork in the Bodleian Library, singing before his grave in public and exchanging correspondence with his son about his father's art, I would not have believed it. To put into context the books which are the subject of this review, I will begin by recapitulating my forays into the world of Tolkien's pictorial art and present the volumes which precede them. If I discount my initiation into the world of Tolkien's art by seeing the setting and the Appendices of The Road Goes Ever On which I purchased in 1974, my first introduction to his artwork began in the mid-1970s with the publication of a series of calendars that George Allen & Unwin released from 1976 to 1979. At that time, my awareness of, and interest in art was quite limited. So was my appreciation of Tolkien's artwork. The art in the 1976 Hobbit Calendar was 'nice', which is typically what I would have said at the time. I appreciated the opportunity that it gave me of having a better view of Tolkien's artwork than the 'cramped' perspective I could have of them in the book and already noticed the differences in colouring between the various reproductions I had encountered. I liked the colouring that a certain H. E. Riddett had applied to his black and white ink drawings. I also relished the opportunity of being able to look at one illustration for a whole month. The 1977 Lord of the Rings Calendar built on this. Apart from Barad-Dûr and The Forest of Lothlórien in Spring, most of the artwork was new. It greatly contributed to my suspension of disbelief and enhanced my impression that Middle-earth was a 'real' place. Even if some of the artwork did not match the story anymore, it made my immersion in Tolkien's universe deeper. In the autumn of 1976 the first edition of The Father Christmas Letters was released. I again appreciated Tolkien's painstaking attention to detail. I marvelled at the love he had obviously poured in his drawings to create this illusion of 'reality' and, for some strange reason, his 'Two Kisses' stamps touched me profoundly. However, I did not perceive his drawings and watercolours as 'Art' as such, and I failed to perceive how exceptional his letters to his children pretending to be Father Christmas actually were. To me, they amounted to nothing more than what a loving parent would do, without noticing than many other children's parents, my own included, had never done it. Also, as the FCL had no obvious connection with Middle-Earth, they were, of course, 'only' of peripheral interest to my youthful limited awareness. It took me years to realise how such loveinduced creativity was special and unusual and how it actually was typical of Tolkien.
Tolkien Studies, 2020
This review, published by Hither Shore magazine, issue 18, 2021,
is a revised version of the one... more This review, published by Hither Shore magazine, issue 18, 2021,
is a revised version of the one published in Tolkien Studies vol. XVII (2020)
Denis Bridoux discusses in detail the two richly illustrated French publications published on the occasion of the major Tolkien exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France François Mitterrand (Paris; 22 October 2019 – 16 February 2020). The exhibition catalogue, edited by Vincent Ferré and Frédéric Manfrin, as well as the thinner album with other illustrations, deliberately differ from the English-language catalogue of the Oxford and New York exhibitions and offer reproductions and illustrations of Tolkien's artworks, manuscripts and artefacts of unprecedented quality. Bridoux's article locates the two publications within the previous discourse on Tolkien's artistic work and acknowledges the achievements of the editors who made these autochthonous French publications possible.
Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society, 1979
TRIZ is becoming recognised as the most powerful and complete philosophy available for the defini... more TRIZ is becoming recognised as the most powerful and complete philosophy available for the definition and solution of technical problems or opportunity situations. As reported by several practitioners, however, TRIZ or more generally ‘systematic creativity ’ is still viewed as being at just the beginning of its eventual evolution path. In this paper we discuss the results of our findings when first applying TRIZ trend prediction principles to predict the future evolution of the various tools, methods and strategies contained in today’s versions of TRIZ, and then integrating some of the findings of the parallel-developed Neuro-Linguistic Programming philosophy. We demonstrate significant common ground between the two approaches and many opportunities for mutually beneficial integration.
TRIZ is becoming recognised as the most powerful and complete philosophy available for the defini... more TRIZ is becoming recognised as the most powerful and complete philosophy available for the definition and solution of technical problems or opportunity situations. As reported by several practitioners, however, TRIZ or more generally ‘systematic creativity ’ is still viewed as being at just the beginning of its eventual evolution path. In this paper we discuss the results of our findings when first applying TRIZ trend prediction principles to predict the future evolution of the various tools, methods and strategies contained in today’s versions of TRIZ, and then integrating some of the findings of the parallel-developed Neuro-Linguistic Programming philosophy. We demonstrate significant common ground between the two approaches and many opportunities for mutually beneficial integration.
Goleman taught us the importance of Emotional Intelligence. Since the publication of his EQ '... more Goleman taught us the importance of Emotional Intelligence. Since the publication of his EQ 'exposition', a whole array of Emotional Intelligence books has appeared, with each title purporting to put those theories of EQ into practice. This book goes deeper. Revealing the structure beneath Emotional Intelligence, 7 Steps utilises its unique framework to combine EQ and Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) - the study of excellence that examines how behaviour is neurologically formulated. 7 Steps confidently integrates the insights of EQ and NLP to promote a greater understanding of how emotions work - and how they can be worked upon. This book is driven by one important message: 'don't just think about it, do it.' A model-based guide packed with powerful NLP exercises and self-assessment techniques, it allows you to generate your own trics, and to partake in an intensive EQ excellence course that utilises the self-programming practices of NLP. A thoroughly structure...
TRIZ is becoming recognised as the most powerful and complete philosophy available for the defini... more TRIZ is becoming recognised as the most powerful and complete philosophy available for the definition and solution of technical problems or opportunity situations. As reported by several practitioners, however, TRIZ or more generally 'systematic creativity' is still viewed as being at just the beginning of its eventual evolution path. In this paper we discuss the results of our findings when
Book Reviews by Denis Bridoux
Tolkien Studies vol. XVI, 2019
This review, published by Hither Shore magazine, issue 17, 2020,
is a revised version of the one ... more This review, published by Hither Shore magazine, issue 17, 2020,
is a revised version of the one published in Tolkien Studies vol. XVI (2019)
The paper is a commented recension of the catalogues of the Oxford 2018 Tolkien exhibition, Tolkien, Maker of Middle-earth and Tolkien Treasures, by Catherine McIlwaine (Oxford: The Bodleian Library, 2018). Inviting the reader to reappraise Tolkien’s art by placing the two books in the context of previous similar publications, the article revisits some familiar drawings with the fresh eye that the improved definition of the pieces provides, sign-pointing features so far unnoticed, and explores many new ones hitherto unpublished.
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Papers by Denis Bridoux
is a revised version of the one published in Tolkien Studies vol. XVII (2020)
Denis Bridoux discusses in detail the two richly illustrated French publications published on the occasion of the major Tolkien exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France François Mitterrand (Paris; 22 October 2019 – 16 February 2020). The exhibition catalogue, edited by Vincent Ferré and Frédéric Manfrin, as well as the thinner album with other illustrations, deliberately differ from the English-language catalogue of the Oxford and New York exhibitions and offer reproductions and illustrations of Tolkien's artworks, manuscripts and artefacts of unprecedented quality. Bridoux's article locates the two publications within the previous discourse on Tolkien's artistic work and acknowledges the achievements of the editors who made these autochthonous French publications possible.
Book Reviews by Denis Bridoux
is a revised version of the one published in Tolkien Studies vol. XVI (2019)
The paper is a commented recension of the catalogues of the Oxford 2018 Tolkien exhibition, Tolkien, Maker of Middle-earth and Tolkien Treasures, by Catherine McIlwaine (Oxford: The Bodleian Library, 2018). Inviting the reader to reappraise Tolkien’s art by placing the two books in the context of previous similar publications, the article revisits some familiar drawings with the fresh eye that the improved definition of the pieces provides, sign-pointing features so far unnoticed, and explores many new ones hitherto unpublished.
is a revised version of the one published in Tolkien Studies vol. XVII (2020)
Denis Bridoux discusses in detail the two richly illustrated French publications published on the occasion of the major Tolkien exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France François Mitterrand (Paris; 22 October 2019 – 16 February 2020). The exhibition catalogue, edited by Vincent Ferré and Frédéric Manfrin, as well as the thinner album with other illustrations, deliberately differ from the English-language catalogue of the Oxford and New York exhibitions and offer reproductions and illustrations of Tolkien's artworks, manuscripts and artefacts of unprecedented quality. Bridoux's article locates the two publications within the previous discourse on Tolkien's artistic work and acknowledges the achievements of the editors who made these autochthonous French publications possible.
is a revised version of the one published in Tolkien Studies vol. XVI (2019)
The paper is a commented recension of the catalogues of the Oxford 2018 Tolkien exhibition, Tolkien, Maker of Middle-earth and Tolkien Treasures, by Catherine McIlwaine (Oxford: The Bodleian Library, 2018). Inviting the reader to reappraise Tolkien’s art by placing the two books in the context of previous similar publications, the article revisits some familiar drawings with the fresh eye that the improved definition of the pieces provides, sign-pointing features so far unnoticed, and explores many new ones hitherto unpublished.