The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull
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*C.S. Lewis, *Charles Williams, and *Owen Barfield. These men, the Zaleskis write, ‘make a perfect compass rose of faith: Tolkien the Catholic, Lewis the “mere Christian,” Williams the Anglican (and magus), Barfield the esotericist’ (p. 12); but the attempt to weave the four lives together is awkward. The Zaleskis admire Lewis as a Christian who learned the errors of his ways when he left the faith, then returned to be its champion, and as a writer and scholar who produced a substantial body of published work. Tolkien, however, is charged with ‘crimes of omission’, with ‘a long trail of starts, stumbles, and stops that typified his dilatoriness in academic labors’, which the Zaleskis attribute to his heart being instead ‘in the development of the legendarium and its offspring’ (p. 214) – though they note the importance of works such as *Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.
Among other works with biographical content, Diana Pavlac Glyer in The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (2007) has a worthwhile discussion of the importance of the Inklings to Tolkien (her Bandersnatch (2015) is an adaptation of the same work for a wider audience). Andrew H. Morton has produced two studies (the first in association with John Hayes) centred on Tolkien’s Aunt *Jane Neave: Tolkien’s Gedling 1914: The Birth of a Legend (2008) and Tolkien’s Bag End: Threshold to Adventure (2009). Phil Mathison has filled in some details about Tolkien’s life during the First World War in Tolkien in East Yorkshire 1917–1918 (2012). And Arne Zettersten in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Double Worlds and Creative Process: Language and Life by Arne Zettersten (2011, previously published in Swedish in 2008) recalls his meetings and conversations with Tolkien in the latter’s final years (although Zettersten refers to correspondence, no quotations are given) and usefully discusses Tolkien’s academic work on the ‘AB language’ (*Ancrene Riwle).
OTHER BIOGRAPHICAL TREATMENTS
We must also mention three biographical sources associated with the Tolkien centenary in 1992. The Tolkien Family Album by *John and Priscilla Tolkien follows more or less the lines that Rayner Unwin had suggested: ‘a pictorial biography, using family pictures for the most part, with extended captions as the text’. It is interesting especially as a brief reminiscence of two of Tolkien’s children, and for its collection of photographs not reproduced elsewhere. Second, the Bodleian Library’s (*Libraries and archives) exhibition catalogue J.R.R. Tolkien: Life and Legend, written by Judith Priestman, describes and reproduces letters, illustrations, and drawings by Tolkien, pages from his academic and literary manuscripts, and photographs of relevant people and places. These are placed in the context of Tolkien’s life, ‘to indicate something of the scope and variety of [his] achievements’ (p. 7). Finally, also issued in 1992 was the film J.R.R.T.: A Portrait of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, 1892–1973, with a script by Helen Dickinson, produced for the Tolkien Partnership by Landseer Film & Television Productions.
There is also useful biographical content in the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout (2006), and in books concerned more generally with the Inklings.
SHORTER BIOGRAPHIES
An ever-increasing number of shorter, illustrated biographies of Tolkien have also appeared, intended for younger (or more casual adult) readers. These include J.R.R. Tolkien: Man of Fantasy by Russell Shorto (1988); J.R.R. Tolkien: Master of Fantasy by David R. Collins (1992), made over in 2005 as J.R.R. Tolkien, significantly shortened and simplified, cluttered with inane sidebars (‘It’s a Fact!’), and injected with references to the Peter Jackson films of The Lord of the Rings (*Adaptations); Myth Maker: J.R.R. Tolkien by Anne E. Neimark (1996); J.R.R. Tolkien: The Man Who Created The Lord of the Rings by Michael Coren (2001); J.R.R. Tolkien: Creator of Languages and Legends by Doris Lynch (2003); J.R.R. Tolkien by Neil Heims (2004); The Importance of J.R.R. Tolkien by Stuart P. Levine (2004); J.R.R. Tolkien: Master of Imaginary Worlds by Edward Willett (2004); J.R.R. Tolkien by Vic Parker (2006); J.R.R. Tolkien by Jill C. Wheeler (2009); J.R.R. Tolkien by Mark Horne (2011); J.R.R. Tolkien by Alexandra Wallner (2011), a picture book in which Tolkien’s life is treated like a board game; and Caroline McAlister, John Ronald’s Dragons: The Story of J.R.R. Tolkien (2017). Each suffers to a degree from factual errors and (even allowing that these are necessarily short books) serious omissions; and many of the authors embroider or exaggerate for dramatic effect. Of these, Collins’ 1992 account is to be preferred for balance and accuracy, but the young person who has read The Lord of the Rings successfully should be equally capable of reading Carpenter’s Biography, and with greater reward.
CONSIDERATIONS IN TOLKIEN BIOGRAPHY
Almost all biographical writings about Tolkien rely to some degree on Carpenter, usually supplemented by reference to Tolkien’s published letters (1981). The best of the later biographies draw as well upon the large number of books and articles, by and about Tolkien, that have appeared since the Biography was published in 1977; the least of them are mere adaptations or reductions of Carpenter’s. The assiduous Tolkien biographer casts a wide net of research, but also must seek to understand what he finds, without assumptions based on his own age or culture – one finds, for instance, in some American accounts of Tolkien’s life, a lack of comprehension of English universities and their customs. It is possible to write an insightful biography without undertaking original research, relying only on existing sources (it is also possible, as we have seen in some books which claim to take a fresh approach to Tolkien’s biography, to turn the facts of his life into fiction); and yet, as shown especially by John Garth in Tolkien and the Great War and his other writings, and by the present book, important information is still to be gleaned from libraries and archives which can change the way we see Tolkien and interpret his works.
Nor can the biographer afford to be uncritical of sources. In the course of writing the Companion and Guide we discovered errors and discrepancies even in standard published works, and inconsistencies in manuscripts and recorded reminiscences. A wealth of information is to be found in a series of recordings of Tolkien’s family and friends made soon after his death by Ann Bonsor, and first broadcast on Radio Oxford in 1974; but in some of these, looking back to times long past, memory demonstrably failed. Nevill Coghill, for one, recalled how as secretary of the Exeter College Essay Club (*Societies and clubs) he had asked Tolkien to read a paper at one of their meetings. Tolkien agreed, and said that the subject of his paper would be ‘the fall of Gondolin’. Coghill remembered that he then spent weeks searching in reference books in vain to find a mention of ‘Gondolin’, not realizing that it was the name of a city in Tolkien’s mythology. Records show, however, that Coghill had not held any office in the Essay Club when Tolkien read The Fall of Gondolin (see *The Book of Lost Tales) to its members, and in fact was elected to the Club only on 27 February 1920, less than two weeks before the event.
Even Tolkien himself sometimes nodded. In referring to his lecture *On Fairy-Stories he twice gave an erroneous date for its delivery at the University of St Andrews (‘1940’ and ‘1938’, in fact 1939), and in his Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings (1965) he wrote that the work ‘was begun soon after The Hobbit was written and before its publication in 1937’, though in fact he began the sequel between 16 and 19 December 1937, after publication of The Hobbit on 22 September 1937. The latter is clear from a reading of Letters, and yet occasionally one still sees it written in books about Tolkien that he began The Lord of the Rings before the publication of The Hobbit, uncritically accepting his misstatement of 1965.
As we state in our preface, we did not write the Companion and Guide to be a substitute for Carpenter’s Biography, nor, even now in the second edition, do we feel that our book replaces Carpenter, but rather is a different, if much more comprehensive approach, to Tolkien’s life. We would agree with John Garth’s comment that ‘with the arrival of the Companion and Guide there ought now to be no excuse, beyond sheer laziness, for other biographers to use Humphrey Carpenter’s 1977 J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography as virtually the sole source of information about Tolkien’s life, as too many have done’ (review of the Companion and Guide, Tolkien Studies 4 (2007), p. 258). On the contrary, David Bratman has suggested that the Companion and Guide, ‘while a