Humphrey CarpenterRecensioni

Humphrey Carpenter's authorized biography of Tolkien is a surprisingly balanced picture of the man. Carpenter clearly admires Tolkien's talent without being blind to his faults. Carpenter simply adores the man for who he was, faults and all, and does not try to paint some mythic portrait of Tolkien. Although Tolkien possessed an extraordinary mind, he was quite - in many aspects - an ordinary man, duty bound to professional obligations and family life. Tolkien preferred the 'quiet life' you see and was in many ways, a Hobbit from the Baggin's side of the tracks in temperament and lifestyle. Yet his mind (I suspect) possessed the longings of a Took...

J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography is immensely readable, and paints a wonderful portrait of a man who in my opinion, is the most important literary figure of the 20th century.

The biography is fine, but what a dully disgusting life.

I fell in love with The Lord of the Rings when I was in high school. Nevertheless, this biography has remained unread on my shelves for over fifteen years. Why? Some authors are an absolute disappointment to read about. I guess I didn’t want to know if the Professor was one of them.

He’s not.

If you had to write a fictional biography for Tolkien it would look much like this.

Orphaned at an early age, he fell In love with a girl, also orphaned and living in the same boarding house.

His fascination with languages, learning ancient languages and even developing his own secret languages based on strict linguistical rules, showed themselves at an early age.

The only disappointment to me was that his fascinating circle of friends didn’t include women. He was a complete product of his time, attending boys’ prep schools and colleges. Only in the very later years is a female graduate student mentioned. This is often reflected in his books, where usually (but not always) women have secondary roles, leaving the adventuring and hero-ing to men.

Highly recommended.½

Until I read this, I didn't know that biographies could be so engaging. Carpenter paints a vivid picture of Tolkien's life, skillfully balancing discussion of his day-to-day life with those elements that might tell us more about how his great works came to be. The writing style is immensely enjoyable, that even the mundanities of Tolkien's daily commutes seem like activity bursting with vitality.

Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award for Best Biography.

I had heard about the Inklings, the group of writers who met regularly in an Oxford pub and in C.S Lewis's rooms at Oxford. They were all writers who were interested in spiritual matters. The meetings on Thursday evening involved reading to each other from recent works and also conversation, arguments and beer. The main three Inklings were Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. I have read much of Lewis and Tolkien's writings but not Charles Williams. After reading The Inklings Williams is on my to read list. I was interested to learn from this book that while they were not regular members of the Inklings other writers visited at times on those Thursday nights. Among the others were Dorothy Sayers and T.S. Elliot. These people were friends but they did not always get along. The saddest part of the book I thought was to learn about the drifting apart of Lewis and Tolkien who had been the closest of friends for many years but saw little of each other in the last ten years of Lewis' life. There have been other books about this gathering of writers. I don't know if they are better or more thorough than Humphrey Carpenter's.

Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends recounts the Oxford University literary club whose members included J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield, among many others, that met at the Eagle and Child Pub between the early 1930s and late 1949. The work, like Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien, examines the men’s work as well as the significance of the place. Carpenter ultimately concludes that C.S. Lewis was key to the Inklings’ existence. He writes, “…the Inklings were just one more Oxford club. Yet they were certainly more than that to Jack Lewis” (pg. 161). Even R.E. Havard concluded that the club was “simply a group of C.S.L.’s wide circle of friends who lived near enough to him to meet together fairly regularly” and that many later historians take them “much more seriously than [they] took [themselves]” (pg. 161). As to literary influence, Carpenter argues that Lewis “alone can be said to have been ‘influenced’ by the others (he was as Tolkien said ‘an impressionable man’), but for the rest it is sufficient to say that they came together because they already agreed about certain things” (pg. 160). Tolkien also referred to the group as “the Lewis séance” (pg. 171). Carpenter’s The Inklings is great literary biography for scholars of Lewis’ and Williams’ work, though he spends less time on Tolkien having already written a biography of Tolkien.½

As a Tolkien fan, this was great! I got a new insight into the life of this history-changing author! After reading, I picked up the Hobbit again and fell into Middle-earth again. A must-read for fans of JRR Tolkien's works!

J.R.R. Tolkien is most well-known to the public as the author of the famous trilogy Lord of the Rings, surely one of the best works of art ever written in the English language. This work by Carpenter serves as his authorized biography. Tolkien’s professorial and academic life as an Oxford don dominates most of the narrative, but always lingering behind lies his unique love of language (philology) – particularly “sub-creating” worlds with language.

Carpenter achieves a balanced job of handling Tolkien’s life. He avoids hagiography while also avoiding smears. Tolkien comes off as a curious professor of Anglo-Saxon literature in an era before technology consumed modern life and before post-graduate research overtook leading universities. His eventual fame due to the famous trilogy comes off as unexpected and unplanned.

Women do not play a major role in this narrative. At the time, Oxford was a mostly male-run institution. Edith, Tolkien’s wife, only played a supporting role for most of his life. His daughter Priscilla did not play a leading role in Carpenter’s narrative either. One could aptly use the word “patriarchal” to describe the arrangement of Tolkien’s life. Indeed, similar words were sometimes used to describe his trilogy. This seems a fair criticism even if it aligned with the sense of his times.

Fans of Lord of the Rings will find Tolkien’s style of working especially interesting. Many are curious about the origins of this tale, and I’m not sure this book provides a definitive answer. It simply sprung from Tolkien’s imagination and life, not from any singular event. Certainly, his experiences in both World Wars played monumental roles as did his male friendships and lifelong experiences creating languages.

This work chronicles the life of this humble yet imaginative professor well and serves his continued cadre of fans. It also provides a historical record of mid-twentieth-century Oxford before it became such a dominant research university and before women played significant roles in its leadership. Carpenter’s work dates from the 1970s (44 years prior to my writing), yet it has aged quite well. I am left with a sense that Tolkien was a man of great curiosity, creativity, and imagination; much like Carpenter admits in his epilogue, I remain mystified, even befuddled, by the transcendent nature of the Lord of the Rings.

Nicely done and enjoyable biography from 1977. Tolkien died in 1973, but Carpenter had been working with him on the biography since before then. Carpenter was from Oxford, where Tolkien worked. Curiously, Carpenter and Tolkien are now buried in the same cemetery. Tolkien did not lead a life of action, but intellectually he took many adventures. Romantically he married his childhood sweetheart, but how they met and what brought them together is one of the more touching aspects of his life. He did not have an easy childhood but somehow made a fairy tale of his life. I was surprised to learn he was a conservative and pious Catholic. This opens many questions unexplored. This is not a deep or scholarly look but for an introduction or even curiosity it is well done, comforting even.

This is the definitive biography of the Inklings. Carpenter does a wonderful job giving the story of the group and the stages of their evolution.

This book was an embarrasingly long time unread on my shelf. My most common excuse for why I haven't read it yet was that I "knew alot about his life anyway" or so I thought. While a basic outline of his life was known to me, Humphrey Carpenter painted a intimate picture of an extraordinarily ordinary man. Carpenter managed to find a good balance between talking about Tolkien's literary creations and Tolkien himself. The account on Tolkien's last years, in particular, were moving. I cannot help, but appreciate Tolkien as the person behind the myth, with his struggle to complete projects in time, his tendency to get lost in details, his complicated, but always deeply loving, relationship with his wife Edith, more than ever before. This will be a book I'll re-read again and again in the years to come.

Useful as a collection of biographies of notable childrens' authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eccentric in its assessments of the meaning and value of their works (Carpenter does not understand Tolkien, whose standard biography he wrote). Contains an extremely unfortunate prophecy in its summarizing chapter, where Carpenter explains why contemporary British writers have not and cannot succeed with children in the US.

In his author’s note to Tolkien: A Biography, Humphrey Carpenter writes that he “tried to tell the story of Tolkien’s life without attempting any critical judgements [sic] of his works of fiction. This is partly in deference to [Tolkien’s] own views, but in many cases it seems to [Carpenter] that the first published biography of a writer is not necessarily the best place to make literary judgements [sic], which will after all reflect the character of the critic just as much as that of his subject” (pg. vii).

Discussing Tolkien’s education, Carpenter describes how the English literature curriculum at King Edward’s School focused primarily on Shakespeare, “which [John] Ronald [Reuel Tolkien] soon found that he ‘disliked cordially,’” especially the fact that in Macbeth, Shakespeare did not actually have Great Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane, which inspired Tolkien to “devise a setting by which the trees might really march to war” (pg. 30). Most importantly, Carpenter describes how Tolkien discovered his love of language first from his mother’s tutoring and later at King Edward’s. While Tolkien began experimenting with inventing languages in his youth, his study of Gothic led him to “develop his invented languages backwards; that is, to posit the hypothetical ‘earlier’ words which he was finding necessary for invention by means of an organised [sic] ‘historical’ system” (pg. 41). At this time, Tolkien first encountered the words Earendel (pg. 71) and Mirkwood (pg. 78) in Anglo-Saxon and Germanic, respectively. Further, Carpenter writes of Tolkien’s interest in philology, “Though he studied the ancient literature of many countries he visited few of them, often through force of circumstance but perhaps partly through lack of inclination. And indeed the page of a medieval text may be more potent than the modern reality of the land that gave it birth” (pg. 63).

Discussing the crafting of what became The Silmarillion after the Great War, Carpenter cautions, “No account of the external events of Tolkien’s life can provide more than a superficial explanation of the origins of his mythology” (pg. 101). Further, an examination of Tolkien’s life as a professor “says nothing about the man who wrote The Silmarillion and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, does nothing to explain the nature of his mind and the way in which his imagination responded to his surroundings. Certain Tolkien himself would have agreed with this” (pg. 136). That said, an appreciation for his life adds context for those interested in Tolkien’s scholarship and the subtle ways it influenced him beyond what can be directly inferred from his day-to-day experiences. As Carpenter argues, “If we are going to understand anything about [Tolkien’s] work as a writer we had better spend a short time examining his scholarship” (pg. 146). That scholarship adds gravitas to Carpenter’s description of Tolkien’s efforts creating both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, where Tolkien described the process as if he were plumbing the depths of mythology similarly to his philological work.

Foreshadowing the Tolkien Estate’s recent concerns with adaptation, sales of The Lord of the Rings benefitted from a radio dramatization, “which inevitably did not meet with Tolkien’s approval, for if he had reservations about drama in general he was even more strongly opposed to the ‘adaptation’ of stories, believing that this process invariably reduced them to their merely human and thus most trivial level” (pg. 254). Carpenter writes of Tolkien’s continued revisions of The Silmarillion during his retirement, “Sub-creation had become a sufficiently rewarding pastime in itself, quite apart from the desire to see the work in print” (pg. 285). Returning to the themes of his author’s note, Carpenter concludes, “[Tolkien’s] real biography is The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion; for the truth about him lies within their pages” (pg. 293).½

That moment when you read a biography of the deceased author of Lord of the Rings and still tear up, when he dies.
Loved the insights into how the story grew within Tolkien, and how the Hobbit, LotR and Silmarillion were written. I also teared up at the response of the first fans to LotR, that was beautiful, I wish I had been there.

Fascinating. I am learning a lot that I did not know.

Other reviews will give you a deeper sense of the structure and content of this magnificent biography. Carpenter succeeds in providing an account of Tolkien's fantastic life and career. He provides the young reader a glimpse of the life lead by one of the greatest authors of the last century without falling into the trp of over-glamorization (Mr. Tolkien's life was anything but, in my opinion).

The purpose for my review, then, if not to provide information relative to the substance of the work, is to urge the reader of Tolkien (old and new alike) to pick up this volume. The information provided herein is invaluable to anyone attempting any serious or real study of the man or of myth.

With his high fantasy literature, J.R.R. Tolkien has provided the tinder that stokes the imagination of millions. His books are known around the world, and for great reason. Having read some of his work myself, thought it prudent to see what events provided him with the impetus to create a whole mythology to boot.

In that sense, J.R.R. Tolkien – A Biography by Humphrey Carter, which was featured in the March Book Haul, provides some illumination into the underlying reasons that drove Tolkien to write what he wrote and create what he did.

The biography is split up into 8 parts, some of which are more interesting than others. Admittedly, autobiographies can run quite dry many times, but this still did a reasonable job of showing us Tolkien in his most authentic form.

Tolkien’s growth, his early years, his friendship with C.S. Lewis, and even his penchant for countless revisions are all catalogued within the book. It was particularly interesting to see what a perfectionist Tolkien was. In a sense, this allowed Tolkien to fine tune his writing process while at the same time expanding his Legendarium.

The Legendarium was created by Tolkien to serve as the fictional mythology about Earth’s remote past, and is composed by The Simarillion, The Hobbit, Lord Of The Rings, The History Of The Middle-Earth and more. This however, is not discussed in the book. I only mention it to supply the fervent reader for additional avenues to explore Tolkien’s unbounded work.

My favorite parts of the autobiography were about the creation of his books. Be that as it may, Tolkien’s skill in poetry, in conjunction with his relentless passion as a philologist to pursue the roots of language and learn everything about it was also highly intriguing.

In fact, regarding his penchant for writing Lord Of The Rings and linguistics, Tolkien had this to say:

“One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one’s personal compost-heap; and my mould is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.”[1]

In its entirety, the book provides ample latitude of background while still providing enough fascinating components of Tolkien’s life. Each reader will undoubtedly gain different insights, but regardless, it’s intriguing to note that Tolkien himself was not an avid fan of biographies.

Tolkien believed that biographies wouldn’t provide the truest nature of the person, and perhaps he was right. Just like movies, which are based on books, provide merely a facsimile of the depth which is entirely superficial of what great books provide, autobiographies will likewise never capture in full breadth and scope the life of an individual. Still, readers are lucky that Tolkien wrote phenomenal fiction because it allows us to see Tolkien’s soul as it is infused within pages. And there’s no more authentic biography than a writer’s words.

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Source:
[1] Humphrey Carter, J.R.R. Tolkien – A Biography, p. 131.

Summary: The biography of the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, describing his early life, participation in The Inklings, and his habits of work, scholarship, and how his most famous works came to be written.

Humphrey Carpenter wrote what, as far as I can ascertain, the first biography of J. R. R. Tolkien, published in 1977, four years after the death of the author of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the unfinished Silmarillion. He opens this book by recounting his first meeting with Tolkien, in 1967. He writes:

"His eyes fix on some distant object, and he seems to have forgotten that I am there as he clutches his pipe and speaks through its stem. It occurs to me that in all externals he represents the archetypal Oxford don, at times even the stage caricature of a don. But that is exactly what he is not. It is rather as if some strange spirit had taken on the guise of an elderly professor. The body may be pacing this shabby little suburban room, but the mind is far away, roaming the plains and mountains of Middle-earth."

Central to Carpenter's narrative of Tolkien's life is his preoccupation with the mythology most fully expressed in his posthumous Silmarillion but also in his earlier "elvish" poetry, The Hobbit, and in the work for which he was most know, The Lord of the Rings. Carpenter sketches the backdrop to this mythology in a life that included the loss of both parents at an early age, the influence of Father Francis, the formation of T.C.B.S. (Tea Club, Barrovian Society, the pre-cursor to the Inklings), his romance and eventual marriage to Edith, his war experiences, his scholarly life as a philologist at Oxford, and his involvement with the Inklings and relationship with C. S. Lewis.

I was surprised that Carpenter did not make more of the influence Tolkien's war experience on his writing, as some recent writers including Joseph Loconte and Colin Duriez have done. [See my reviews of A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War and Bedeviled]. I wonder if for Carpenter, he would have traced more of the influence in Tolkien's books to the mythologies of Iceland, Beowulf, to Arthurian legend, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

We learn of some of the childhood places, reminiscent of his descriptions of The Shire. We see his love of fairy stories and eventually Icelandic myths. And during his convalescence from the war, we see his first musings on a mythology that would occupy his life. Carpenter describes the beginnings of The Hobbit in stories told to his children, unconnected at first to the rest of the developing mythology, and the important role his publisher's son had in persuading him to publish this story. Then there is the pressure for "more Hobbit stories" that leads to the beginning of the writing of The Lord of the Rings, which would occupy twelve years. We learn that Tolkien really hadn't connected it to his larger mythology until Frodo and the Ring arrive at Rivendell. Carpenter recounts the back and forth with his publisher over publishing The Silmarillion concurrently, and the endless revising and development of backgrounds, history, and language that would occupy Tolkien for the rest of his life.

Carpenter presents us a very human figure, yet always sympathetically. He portrays a perfectionist, who is held up from publishing so much more by his endless revising. We learn of the tensions this creates with C. S. Lewis, who in short order (by comparison) dashes off the Narnia stories, which Tolkien thought too allegorical. He resented Lewis's popularity as an apologist, considering it not quite fitting for an Oxford don, although the two remained fast friends until Lewis's death. We see a scholar caught up in the very male atmosphere of Oxford scholarship, including the circle of the Inklings, something his wife never felt at home with. Only in her latter years, when they lived at Bournemouth, did she find a circle of friends that she was at home with. We observe a marriage characterized by abiding love, and yet with the accommodations made by many people in these times who lived in two different worlds defined along gender lines. On their headstones, he is "Beren" and she "Luthien."

I think this is an essential biography for an Inklings fan, arising out of acquaintance with Tolkien, friendship with his family, and a sympathetic appreciation of the genius that created Middle-earth and the flat sides that come with such genius. He portrays a man who lived in hobbit-like modesty enjoying the pleasures of home and a good pipe, yet caught up in a truly great story in which he played a most significant part.

Absolutely loved it!!!! A great book

Lovely biographical study of a circle of friends oh God I'm in too much pain after dancing like a lunatic at my sister's wedding, I'll review this anon.

Really liked it.

It is a biography of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams and it dabbles into the story of the people that joined them for their Inkling meetings.

Lewis was the person that really pulled the group together so the book does focus on him in the beginning and end. I grew to like Williams more towards the end of the book but his beliefs were an odd mix of mysticism and Christianity. It was pointed out that some of life was walled off from the Inklings so the reader gets a fuller opportunity to judge him than Lewis and Tolkien did. Tolkien did not care much for Williams and this led to a cooling of friendship between Lewis and Tolkien. Which was a shame.

It's worth noting that Tolkien said that Lewis's gift of encouragement was the only thing that kept him writing for years. Without Lewis it is possible we never would have had the Lord of the Rings.

Lewis and Tolkein did have different views on some subjects within their faith. But, this did not stop them from seeing the value in the good each followed.

The best and most attractive thing about this book was the story of friendship and how the group met frequently and celebrated their shared passions in their own community around story, good food and drink, tobacco, and friendship. It's a wonderful life.

I am too many steps removed from Spike Milligan to fully appreciate this book. The only bit of his work I'm familar with at all is his poetry which I find very amusing.

Carpenter states that this "book is largely concerned with C.S. Lewis; for, as I have argued in it, the Inklings owned their existence as a group almost entirely to him." It's a reasonable argument to make: The Inklings' Thursday meetings were held in Lewis' rooms at Magdelen College, and Lewis was responsible for the inclusion of several other regular Inklings: his brother Warnie, for one, and Charles Williams for another.
Tolkien and Williams are both mentioned in the book's subtitle, but Carpenter had already written about Tolkien's life in J.R.R. Tolkien: A biography, and as Williams was only in Oxford during WWII, his involvement and influence was more limited. Therefore The Inklings is framed by Lewis' life; it begins with Lewis as a young boy and ends with his death.

Nonetheless, it is also a biography of a group of friends. Carpenter looks at the other labels one might give the Inklings and shows that "friends" is the only one which fits perfectly. (They had things in common - Oxford, Christianity, attitudes to literature - but even then, these things defined each of them in different ways. And they were not all academics or even writers.) Both of these focuses, Lewis and friendship, go hand-in-hand; Lewis valued his friendships very highly and they had a huge influence on his life.

I like the approach Carpenter takes - it is intelligent, informative and carefully researched. He constantly quotes the Inklings themselves - mostly things they wrote in letters or diaries (and provides an appendix of sources. After the internet's relaxed attitude to providing formal citations, I found this refreshing). He also writes about the Inklings as if they were real people: they have prejudices and inconsistencies and mysteries which even a careful biographer cannot conclusively answer.
By the time Carpenter spends a chapter imagining the conversation at an Thursday night meeting of the Inklings, it is clear that Carpenter knows his subjects - their relationships, their opinions and the sorts of conversations they had - very well. "Thursday evenings" is delightfully plausible and ultimately does not pretend to be anything more than what it is: an artificial reconstruction which attempts to catch "the flavour of those Thursday evenings" rather than provide an completely factual account.

I found the The Inklings to be absolutely fascinating. And then I had to read J.R.R. Tolkien: a biography.

(I wrote a longer version of this review, which includes quotes, here.)½

As you'd expect from a book which has the word 'dynasty' in the title The Seven Lives of John Murray: The Story of a Publishing Dynasty was chock full of DATA. SO MUCH DATA. As you'd expect, there's a lot of history wrapped up in a publishing agency which was opened in 1768 and lasted until 2002. Full disclosure: I had never heard of John Murray Publishing (or so I thought until I unearthed a blog entry I had written in 2010 when I apparently visited an exhibit on the subject). You might not have either but you've definitely heard of some of the authors they've published throughout the years. For instance, John Murray II (you're maybe getting the meaning behind the book title right about now) published Lord Byron, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott. John Murray III brought Charles Darwin on board for his work On the Origin of Species which you may have heard about... Throughout its many years, the agency was well-known for its educational material such as medical textbooks, history books, and general science books. When the company was taken over this was what was deemed most viable although the Murray Archive which contained scores of correspondence and manuscripts from a variety of authors and other personages (what?) was valued at £45 million. O_O If you're interested in publishing or simply like to know historical facts about a company that lasted more than 200 years then you can't go wrong with this book.