L’etica fantastica e la sperimentazione divertente: Tracce di Novecento nei mondi immaginati di J.R.R. Tolkien

The focus of this article is J.R.R Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle, a small metanarrative jewel, written between the 1930s and 1940s, and published in 1945. The tale acts as a provocative metalinguistic device, since it weaves together a network of references, connections, suggestions and evidence that link Tolkien’s writing to the spirit and experimental character of his time. Leaf by Niggle is a very enjoyable reflection on the making of art, on the relationship between imagination and creation, between the conception and implementation of a work of art. As such, it places itself along a line of continuity, literally intertextual, with some modernist reflections on representation and its means and mechanisms. The fantastic genre is here a precise aesthetic choice, capable of broadening its potential thanks to the peculiarities of a certain imaginative force, which in turn becomes the engine for a signicant ethical perspective.