The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 of the Inklings (2015) by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, a work which also aims to be a joint biography of Tolkien, *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 СКАЧАТЬ