I do not object to biographical notice, if it is desirable (the Dutch [translation of The Lord of the Rings] did without it). But it should be correct, and it should be pertinent. …
Who is Who is not a safe source in the hands of foreigners ignorant of England. From it Ohlmarks has woven a ridiculous fantasy. Ohlmarks is a very vain man … preferring his own fancy to facts, and very ready to pretend to knowledge which he does not possess. He does not hesitate to attribute to me sentiments and beliefs which I repudiate. Amongst them a dislike of the University of Leeds, because it was ‘northern’ and no older than the Victorian seventies. This is impertinent and entirely untrue. [letter to Alina Dadlez, Letters, p. 305]
Ohlmarks had also made numerous factual mistakes, such as that the Tolkien–Gordon edition of *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925) was first published in 1934.
On 23 February 1966 Tolkien wrote to *W.H. Auden, who planned to write a book about him, that he regarded ‘such things as premature impertinences; and unless undertaken by an intimate friend, or with consultation of the subject (for which at present I have no time), I cannot believe that they have a usefulness to justify the distaste and irritation given to the victim. I wish at any rate that any book could wait until I produce the Silmarillion’ (Letters, p. 367). Indeed, not until *The Silmarillion was published in 1977 could one begin to appreciate Tolkien’s life’s-work, while today the biographer of Tolkien overlooks at his peril the long circuitous development of the mythology documented in *The History of Middle-earth (1983–96), as well as other works published still later.
EARLY BIOGRAPHIES
And yet Tolkien did not veto a book about him published in 1968 by William Ready, the former Director of Libraries at Marquette University (*Libraries and archives) to which Tolkien had sold some of his literary papers. The Tolkien Relation: A Personal Enquiry by William Ready (reprinted as Understanding Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings) is ‘personal’ in the double sense that it is one man’s view of his subject, and an enquiry into Tolkien’s life and character relative to his fiction, primarily The Lord of the Rings. Ready evidently hoped to play on his subject’s past acquaintance to gain his support and approval; and it may be that a sense of gratitude, for the interest Ready had shown in his work while at Marquette, prevented Tolkien from replying as forcefully has he had to W.H. Auden. Nevertheless he declined to supply personal information to Ready, once again citing a dislike of ‘being written about’, the results of which to that date ‘have caused me both irritation and distaste.’ And he hoped that Ready would make his treatment ‘literary (and as critical of that aspect as you like)’ rather than personal (letter to Ready, 2 February 1967, quoted in The Tolkien Relation, pp. 55–6).
Having seen Ready’s book in print, Tolkien wrote to Clyde S. Kilby:
Though ill-written it is not entirely without value, since the man is intelligent. But he is a rogue. … Ready paid me a 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