I'm going to spill my deep, dark secret right at the outset. I've been a fan of SF, fantasy, horror and mystery for as long as I've been able to read, but in those nearly forty years I've never read anything by J.R.R. Tolkien. I wince even as I type these words, half expecting to be pelted with a rotten tomato at any moment.
I'm still not quite sure how this all came about - or didn't come about, to be more precise. As the years have passed, I've developed something of an aversion to trilogies, series and the like, those vast works in which each installment is sufficiently weighty to be used as a ship's anchor. But it wasn't always that way. I've read Frank Herbert's original Dune trilogy at least three or four times and the subsequent books nearly as many.
None of which tells you, the reader, anything about the volume under consideration, so let's get on with it. I guess what I'm leading up to is that it is a right interesting piece of work, even if, like me, you haven't read any of Tolkien's work. I zipped right through it with pleasure, never finding myself hampered in the least by a lack of familiarity with the Tolkien oeuvre
When it comes right down to it, Carpenter's book - at 260 pages - is a relatively slim volume, considering its subject. But that's probably because Carpenter focuses on Tolkien's writing only at the minimum level needed to tell the story of his life. This is a biography, in the strictest sense of the word, and includes virtually no criticism of Tolkien's work. As Carpenter explains, in a prefatory note, this is in more or less in deference to Tolkien's distaste for biography, in general, and more specifically for biography as a thinly veiled form of literary criticism.
A few points stand out as Carpenter traces Tolkien's life from his birth in 1892 to his death in 1973. First is what a surprisingly ordinary - almost mundane - life the man lived, especially when you consider that he created one of the most extraordinary literary works of the twentieth century.
The other interesting point is how Tolkien's well-known affinity for languages was almost more important to him than the stories he told, to the extent that the tales were created as much to provide a framework to hang Tolkien's invented languages on as out of any need to tell a story.
Though the book was first published in 1977, the edition reviewed was issued in 2000, during the recent wave of Tolkien mania touched off by the release of Peter Jackson's striking filmed adaptations. This latest version adds or updates nothing since the original version, published four years after Tolkien's death, nor does it really need to. Carpenter set out to tell the story of Tolkien's life and did so rather admirably, a task which was later supplemented when he presided over the release of a volume of Tolkien's letters. But any discussion of the reaction to Tolkien's work since his death would be superfluous and belongs to a volume other than this brief, but worthwhile one.
William I. Lengeman III has never worn a ring. More on his writings at http://wileng.home.mindspring.com/.
© William I. Lengeman III
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