IMMAGINARIO E MITO IN “IL SIGNORE DEGLI ANELLI” DI J.R.R. TOLKIEN
IMAGINARY AND MYTH IN "THE LORD OF THE RINGS" BY J.R.R. Tolkien

Summary/Abstract: It is thought to have overcome the mythical representation because the objective representation of science has got rid of the myth. C. Levi-Strauss writes in this sense: “In the seventeenth century men rejected mythology” (p. 13, 1990) at that time, precise, the birth of scientific thought leads civilization to divorce from the mythical universe. For the latter, the myth is dead or more or less passed to the background as a type of intellectual construction. In fact, it is a question that we must ask: in a world framed by techno-science, is there place for a mythical representation of the world? Does the scientific representation really force us to consider myth as a wander of the human spirit? Will we have to see a popular imagination in the mythical representation? We think that there will always be a place for the mythical representation of the universe next to the scientific explanation of the universe. Both are not on the same level. Mythology, like science, is therefore a product of the intellect. In one of his many epistles, it is Tolkien himself who reveals that his “great book” (The Lord of the Rings) is nothing more than an imaginary world created with the sole purpose of making his own linguistic corpus alive. Arda’s languages, therefore, were not a direct consequence of the creation of Middle-earth, but vice versa: every language, on the other hand, resembles the people who speak it. The aspiration to possess reality through the true knowledge of names is the return of man to the Adam’s myth of the assignment of names to things.

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