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

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СКАЧАТЬ short visit [in April 1967]. … A large part of the time he was with me he was talking about himself. I can now see his difficulty. If he had brought out a notebook and informed me of his object, I should have shown him out. He therefore had to rely on his own memory of the few remarks I made about my personal history. These he appears to have embroidered with wholly illegitimate deductions of his own and the addition of baseless fictions. [4 June 1968, Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois]

      Among these, Ready says that Tolkien’s mother, Mabel Suffield (*Mabel Tolkien), before her marriage had ‘worked with her sisters as a missionary among the women of the Sultan of Zanzibar’ (The Tolkien Relation, p. 6); that she died in 1910, not 1904; that Tolkien gave the W.P. Ker Lecture in 1933 (in fact it was in 1953); and that one of the *Oxford pubs in which the *Inklings met was the ‘Burning Babe’, presumably a mishearing of ‘Bird and Baby’, a nickname of the Eagle and Child. Mabel’s service in Zanzibar, a story wholly without foundation, in particular has cast a long shadow over later biographies and biographical sketches.

      The first full biography of Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien: Architect of Middle Earth by Daniel Grotta (or Grotta-Kurska), was published in 1976, three years after its subject’s death. To its credit, far more than may be said for most later accounts, it is the product of appreciable research, in libraries and through personal contacts. Grotta was denied access to Tolkien’s private papers, however, and according to his author’s note (p. 160) the Tolkien family ‘requested Tolkien’s close friends and associates to refrain from giving me information, out of respect for Tolkien’s memory’. By that time Humphrey Carpenter had been commissioned to write the biography described below, to which the Tolkien Estate gave preference. Grotta was also refused permission to publish some of the material he was able to glean nevertheless: there are omissions in his 1976 text, each with the label ‘deleted for legal considerations’. Under these circumstances he learned nothing of the *T.C.B.S., and concluded that Tolkien was referring to his fellow Oxford student *Allen Barnett (rather than *Christopher Wiseman) when he said that all but one of his close friends had been killed in the First World War. And since Grotta produced his biography too early to have read The Silmarillion (published in 1977), he could say little of substance about that seminal work, and with no knowledge of its manuscripts he wrote a confused description of its history.

      Omissions such as these limit the usefulness of Grotta’s book, while its reliability is called into question by many careless errors, only a few of which need be mentioned. He mistakenly names as ‘Tolkien’s first tutor … a young Fellow named Joseph Wrighty, who had arrived at Oxford in the same year as Tolkien’ (p. 38; the eminent *Joseph Wright had been at Oxford since 1888 and a professor since 1901). Grotta notes that Tolkien took a Second in ‘Moderns (which included Anglo-Saxon, as opposed to Greek and Latin)’ (p. 39), rather than Honour Moderations, an examination for those reading Classics. He names *Nevill Coghill rather than *Norman Davis as Tolkien’s successor as Merton Professor of English Language and Literature (Coghill became the Merton Professor of English Literature in 1957, before Tolkien retired). And he describes the Ace Books edition of The Lord of the Rings as having ‘neither index nor appendices’ (p. 126), though it does include the latter.

      In the second edition of his book, retitled The Biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, Architect of Middle-earth (1978), Grotta made a few minor alterations, having ‘received much additional information from readers’ (p. 175; Carpenter’s Biography had appeared the previous year), but the greater number of errors from the previous text remained. One of these, in which Tolkien is said to have written a work called Númenor in the 1920s which preceded *‘The Silmarillion’ (the reverse of the actual sequence), is even compounded in Grotta’s second edition, in a new ‘epilogue’ on The Silmarillion then recently published. The 1992 reprint of his book contains a new preface, but is otherwise unchanged.

      One review of the first edition of our Companion and Guide criticized us for not making more reference to Grotta, specifically to his use of the papers of Allen Barnett, which were seen as providing a window into Tolkien’s experiences at Exeter College (*Oxford). But Grotta’s reliability is so frequently called into question that it did not seem safe to trust his transcriptions any more than his facts, without verification. In this regard we could mention one passage almost certainly misattributed by Grotta to Tolkien, an off-colour joke said to survive in a typewritten letter sent to Allen Barnett and used to illustrate Tolkien’s ‘schoolboy wit’ as an Oxford undergraduate (pp. 37–8 first edition; pp. 42–3 later editions). In content and style, it is unlike any demonstrably early correspondence by Tolkien we have read, and includes distinctly American usages. Variants of this text in fact appear to have been in common circulation, perhaps since the late nineteenth century.

      J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter (in the United States, originally Tolkien: A Biography), first published in 1977, is much to be preferred to Grotta. Publisher *Rayner Unwin recalled that he

      had long worried that without an authorised biography there 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.

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