An bhfuil Tolkien feicithe agat le deanail?

19.11.08, 10:38, dodany przez Telperion

This travel report was first published by Telperion in Polish on 3 October 2008
Translated into English (Westron) by Noatar
You can join us during our Tolkienian travel to England, Wales and Ireland in Summer 2009!

Yesterday we went on the long-awaited trip to County Kerry. Generally speaking, it had been since I had read about Professor Tolkien’s stay in Kerry in J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator a couple of years before that I wanted to go there, and find the view from one of his drawings, or even some people who might still remember Professor Tolkien visiting these parts of Ireland. It seemed impossible to me that nothing should have been left of his visit in such a small village as Castlecove, Tolkien being, after all, an Oxford professor. We set out from Cork just as Tolkien once had, accompanied by his wife and daughter. Ireland of the year1952 must have looked like a completely different world than what we saw that day, we wondered. We also tried to work out how Tolkien had come up with an idea to go on holiday to Kerry. In The J.R.R Tolkien Companion and Guide (Christina Scull, Wayne G. Hammond; Vol I, p. 376) I found under the date late July – 15 August 1951 one particular note:

They travel to North Wales and take the ferry from Fishguard to Cork where they are met by Bridget McCarty, Professor of English at University College, Cork, whom Tolkien has met when examining in Ireland, and who has become a friend as well as a colleague. The Tolkiens stay for a few days in Cork with Bridget and her aunt, then are driven by Bridget to Castle Cove  [it should be Castlecove] (…).

We can gather from the above fragment that it might have been Bridget who persuaded Tolkien to go on holiday to Kerry. And despite the fact that the Ring of Kerry is numbered among the most enchanting places in Ireland, Castelcove alone has never drawn my attention. It is so small a village that one finds it impossible to imagine it in 1951 as a real place. It gives the impression of having had no more than a tiny hotel, shop-cum-bar and a petrol station with only one pump… (By the way, nothing has changed here since.) Tolkien did choose a strange place, all the more that some 5 miles north of the village can be found Caherdaniel, a town of great beauty, my favourite place in the region. Don’t get me wrong: Castlecove is a very beautiful town, and so are its mountains and a nearby beach… Well, it might be that Tolkien went in search of this kind of place in order to have a rest from Oxford.

We reached Caherdaniel, a place which ‘The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide’ described as ‘the village of Derrynane.’ By way of explanation: ‘Derrynane House’ was the home of Catholic Irish politician, Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847), who was also the owner of a local domain. It is now an Irish National Monument, a museum. Tolkien used to go to mass to Caherdaniel, for this is where a church now stands, and not to Derrynane. And so we came across the church mentioned in ‘The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide’. The real riddles in the dark, it seemed. Nobody had heard here about Tolkien ever going to holiday here, but they’d heard about the O’Flaherty family. Later we were going down a beautiful, winding road; I felt a bit strange, as if I had been transferred from my own room right to some film set.

At the tiny petrol station we met a man; he recalled the O’Flahertys: five sisters and a brother. He then pointed to the local pub, The Black Shop-cum-Bar, which had been run, he said, by two of the sisters – Katherine and Mary. (Today it has another owner, and part of it where there once was a shop has been converted into a pub.) Other sister of the three left had run a guest house where Tolkien, Edith and Priscilla had stayed. The interesting thing was, our speaker said, none of the O’Flahertys had been married or had had children, and so the hotel hadn’t found a new owner. Nowadays it is a crumbling building.

On our way back, especially when we were passing near Castlecove and Caherdaniel, I was looking out the window hoping to spot the view that Tolkien had immortalized on one of the first pages of his new sketchbook. Sorry to say, I spotted none. But we can still experience a good deal more during the oncoming Wales-Ireland Expedition in 2009. After all, you can’t expect one man to discover all there is yet to uncover…

In the town of Waterville, located a couple of miles north of Caherdaniel, you can find a monument to Charlie Chaplin, once a visitor to the town. I was thinking about building a monument to J.R.R. Tolkien back in Castelcove, the place where our writer had spent – together with Edith and Priscilla – probably one of the most enjoyable holidays of his life. I believe it’s time to take some action, folks…

The note was published in the section Biografia Tolkiena, Felietony tolkienowskie of Elendilion

Kategorie wpisu: Biografia Tolkiena, Felietony tolkienowskie, News in Westron (English)