The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull
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would inevitably be ill-informed and tendentious writings about Tolkien over which neither he nor we [his publishers] would have any control. In his lifetime Tolkien had brushed aside the fear, and for him it would indeed have been yet another distraction. But after his death it was one of the first matters that I raised with the [Tolkien] family. They accepted the need for something to be done, but were doubtful about who could be entrusted with such a commission and what control there might be over what was written. As a stop-gap solution I suggested a pictorial biography, using family pictures for the most part, with extended captions as the text. … *Priscilla [Tolkien], who lived in Oxford, knew a young man that she thought might be suitable. He worked for Radio Oxford, and I agreed to meet him. Humphrey Carpenter … was personable, eager, and willing to throw up his job on the radio to undertake our project. I didn’t think a mixture of photographs and extended captions needed any great qualifications so I agreed terms on the spot and encouraged him to get down to work. The material he needed for his research was stored in the converted barn next to the house that *Christopher [Tolkien] was then living in outside Oxford, and Humphrey found himself working closely alongside Christopher.
It soon became apparent that Humphrey had dug himself so enthusiastically into the project that a full-scale biography was in the making. Christopher seemed agreeable, and so was I. [George Allen & Unwin: A Remembrancer (1999), pp. 248–9]
To date, only Carpenter among Tolkien’s biographers has had full access to his subject’s private papers. In addition, he was able to interview members of Tolkien’s family and many friends and colleagues, and he had a good personal knowledge of Oxford and understanding of university life. Although ‘authorized’ by the Tolkien family, his book is by no means hagiography: it does not omit mention, for instance, of the younger Tolkien’s occasional bouts of despair, or of tensions within his marriage. And having been vetted by Christopher Tolkien, it contains very few errors or misinterpretations. (We note occasional disagreements with Carpenter in Chronology, and in the Reader’s Guide under *Reading.) Comparatively short by later standards, only (in its first edition) 260 pages excluding appendices and index, the Biography serves its purpose well without verbosity. In later editions its checklist of Tolkien’s published writings was expanded to include further posthumous works, but as of this writing it is many years out of date.
Carpenter’s own, not always favourable views about his biography of Tolkien may be found in ‘Learning about Ourselves: Biography as Autobiography’, a conversation with Lyndall Gordon, in The Art of Literary Biography, ed. John Batchelor (1995), and probably in one paragraph – the subject may be reasonably inferred – of his ‘Lives Lived between the Lines’ in the Times Saturday Review (London), 27 February 1993.
The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends (1978), also by Humphrey Carpenter, is a useful adjunct to Biography though its concentration is on Lewis as the centre of the group of friends.
LATER BIOGRAPHIES
Although Tolkien: Man and Myth by Joseph Pearce (1998) often has been called a biography, it more narrowly explores the significance of Middle-earth and what it represented in Tolkien’s thought, and the connection between his religious faith and his life and writings – ‘internal’ biography more so than ‘external’. About a third of its text consists of long quotations by Tolkien himself and from writings about him, while several chapters are little more than a summary of Carpenter’s Biography.
Tolkien: A Biography by Michael White (2001) is largely a retelling of the standard life by Carpenter. In order to provide ‘a more colourful image of the creator of Middle-earth’ (p. 6), White adopted a ‘breezy’ prose style and, to impart a sense of immediacy, often assumes knowledge of thoughts and feelings. The tone of his book is set at once, as he imagines Tolkien returning home on ‘a warm early summer afternoon’, kissing his wife, and greeting ‘his baby daughter, five-month-old Priscilla’ (pp. 7–8) – even though Priscilla Tolkien was born on 18 June 1929, and could not have been five months old in ‘early summer’. In the same chapter White reports a ‘legend’ not substantiated anywhere else, that Tolkien was inspired to write the first line of *The Hobbit when he noticed a hole in his study carpet. Such inventions or suppositions are frequent in White’s book, together with many errors of fact.
The chief focus of Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth by John Garth (2003; emended in the 2nd printing) is narrow, roughly from the end of Tolkien’s days at *King Edward’s School, *Birmingham to his demobilization from the Army. But Garth examines those formative years (1911–19) more fully than Carpenter was able to do, due to the opening some years later of pertinent First World War papers in the National Archives (Public Record Office). Garth also made a more extensive use of correspondence by Tolkien’s friends, to relate Tolkien’s military experiences and comradeship in the T.C.B.S. to his early poems (in so far as these had been published) and the beginnings of his mythology and invented languages. His study arose, he said, from his observation that Tolkien ‘embarked upon his monumental [‘Silmarillion’] mythology in the midst of the First World War, the crisis of disenchantment that shaped the modern era’; and one of his aims was ‘to place Tolkien’s creative activities in the context of the international conflict, and the cultural upheavals which accompanied it’ (p. xiii). A ‘Postscript’ or summation follows the biography proper.
Garth has continued to expand upon his 2003 book in later, shorter publications, including ‘Tolkien, Exeter College and the Great War’, in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration, ed. Stratford Caldecott and Thomas Honegger (2008); ‘J.R.R. Tolkien and the Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Fairies’ (on the Gilson family), Tolkien Studies 7 (2010); ‘Robert Quilter Gilson, T.C.B.S.: A Brief Life in Letters’, Tolkien Studies 8 (2011); and Tolkien at Exeter College (2014; emended in the 4th printing).
J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography by Leslie Ellen Jones (2003) is aimed specifically at an American schools audience. For the sake of the student reader, she frequently interrupts her narrative of Tolkien’s life to explain about late nineteenth-century British society, English as a Germanic language, the causes of the First World War, and the like; and she often comments on matters of current social concern, such as class distinctions and the role of women. She devotes two chapters of her book to a discussion of The Lord of the Rings.
Since 1992 Colin Duriez has written several books on Tolkien or the Inklings which are at least partly biographical. These tend to be repetitive and lightweight in content. The most substantive is J.R.R. Tolkien: The Making of a Legend (2012), though considerably shorter than Carpenter’s biography. Duriez himself admits that his book does not supplant Carpenter’s, which is ‘still indispensible, even now that so many more of Tolkien’s writings are available, not least because of his access to private documents and his ability to make sense of a universe of unfinished writings, diaries in code, and contradictory opinions’. Duriez’s book ‘is not intended for scholars but for ordinary readers wishing to explore the life of Tolkien and how it relates to his stories of Middle-earth’ (p. 9).
One of the most important biographies since Carpenter’s is Tolkien by Raymond Edwards (2014). Although Edwards depends a great deal on Carpenter, his book is not a mere update of Biography but incorporates more recent research and offers fresh insights. After a comparatiely weak account of Tolkien’s early years, once he reaches the point when Tolkien began to work seriously on *The Book of Lost Tales and associated poems, Edwards grasps the opportunity offered by The History of Middle-earth and the linguistic journal Parma Eldalamberon to follow the development of Tolkien’s legendarium and associated languages. He is particularly illuminating in his treatment of Tolkien’s academic career, and devotes considerable space to topics such as Philology and the *Oxford English School. He shows far more understanding than some other recent commentators of the demands Tolkien’s academic duties made on his time. In the main text, he says only what is necessary about religion in Tolkien’s life, instead devoting an appendix to Tolkien’s practice of his Catholic faith and the presence of Catholicism in his writings (*Religion).
Tolkien’s religion is more of a concern in The Fellowship: The Literary Lives