J.R.R. Tolkien: A biography by Humphrey Carpenter

I got this book about two-three weeks ago at the Lahore Book Fair but tried hard to keep myself away from it. Why, you’ll ask. I actually have a book reading obsession syndrome or something of that sort and I do not mean it at all in a positive way. What happens is that when I start reading a book, I just keep on reading it on and on even if my finals are a week away and if the stars are too much against me I am carried by an uncontrollable reading ride and start on another book, even if I’ve actually read that book before. I do not have the power to control. Hope I am able to cultivate it soon otherwise I am surely a goner. So, if there is a book fair in town, its actually bad news for my studies.

Anyway, I finally succumbed and read it and quite surprisingly without skipping a page or two in between. When my mind reviews the word ‘biography’ I get a dull, cheerless feeling, that of reading a half monotonous account of a person’s life ( I haven’t at the moment gone onto reading biographies much). But this one goes on like a story. His birth in Bloemfontein, South Africa, his unusual flair and love for languages at an early age, his formative four years at Saremole Hill (which as the author says is perhaps a model for Hobbiton), his school, then going on to become a Professor of Anglo-Saxon and of course the fashioning of his Middle-Earth and its languages; all of it is brilliantly told in a perfect, savoury language. I would say I loved it.

It tells of the history behind the stories, influences of Finnish, Icelandic on his stories and languages. The story of Turin in the Silmarillian is actually an amalgamation of the Finnish Kalevala(description from the author: Finnish Kalevala or the Land of Heroes, the collection of poems which is the principal repository of Finland’s mythology) containing a story of Kullervo, who unknowingly commits incest and then throws himself on his sword, and of the Icelandic legend of Sigurd killing the dragon Fafnir. It’s fascinating to know!

And besides that I got to know, curious little fascinating facts: like the initial hero of Lord Of the Rings was a hobbit named Bingo (after a set of koala bears, 'the Bingos', his children had) but as the story took on a more serious and a grander tone, the name was changed to Frodo who was initially just a companion of Bingo. And how there was this postcard he got on his return from his journey to Switzerland, and on it was “a reproduction of a painting by a German artist, J. Madlener. It is called Der Berggeist, the mountain spirit, and it shows an old man sitting on a rock under a pine tree. He has a white beard and wears a wide-brimmed round hat and along cloak. He is talking to a white fawn that is nuzzling his upturned hands, and he has a humourous but compassionate expression; there is a glimpse of rocky mountains in the distance. Tolkien preserved this postcard carefully, and long afterwards he wrote on the paper cover in which he kept it: ‘Origin of Gandalf’.” How hobbit might be taken from ‘Marvellous land of Snergs’, a book his children read; Snergs being people as tall as an average table but broad-shouldered and a people of strength, and from Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. I loved the part of Father Christmas letters he used to write to his children, with an account of the recent happenings at the North Pole in a shaky hand of Father Christmas,'the rune-like capitals used by the Polar Bear or the flowing script of Ilbereth'.

Anyway, I could go on and on about the book. I think it’s a must read for everyone interested in Tolkien, his life and works.