About Tolkien

The King Under the Mountain: In Search of J. R. R. Tolkien "is not a biography of Tolkien.... It is, rather, 'a series of fan’s notes, material brought back from some of the remoter caverns of Tolkien’s imagination, into which...critics and biographers have rarely strayed.'” From today's review of the book in the WSJ:

Mr. Taylor’s search is consistently engaging and a pleasure to read. The caverns of his own mind are amply stocked with information not only about Tolkien and his largely uneventful life in England, but also the academic and literary worlds in which the chronicler of Middle-earth went about his duties and authorial purposes.

By the time The Lord of the Rings was published in full, Tolkien was 63. Known to friends as Ronald, he was a teacher of English, first at Leeds University and then, beginning in 1925, at Oxford, where he rose to the position of Merton Professor. His specialty was Anglo-Saxon language and literature, with a penchant for the former. Even Chaucer, the first major writer in Middle English, could seem, to Tolkien, a bit progressive. ....

Wain reminded readers of his autobiography that in Tolkien’s time the Oxford English syllabus “was weighted in favor of the Middle Ages.” It was possible to get a degree without having read a page of Charles Dickens, George Eliot or Thomas Hardy, but not without having studied the 14^th century poem “Piers Plowman.” To Amis, the study of Old English at Oxford “carried the redoubted impediment of having Tolkien, incoherent and often inaudible, lecturing on it.”

It is hardly surprising that the professor, into his 50s when the Amis set arrived on campus, felt out of touch among this new type of student—the “angry young man.” When introduced to Ava Gardner by the poet Robert Graves in 1964, Tolkien thought her “a pleasant young woman...well but quietly dressed, easy and agreeable, and we got on quite well.” According to Mr. Taylor, “Tolkien, being Tolkien, did not of course know who Miss Gardner was.” ....

Tolkien didn’t want readers to think of The Lord of the Rings as some kind of political allegory, like Animal Farm. He dismissed the suggestion that Mordor might represent the Soviet Union and that its ruler, Sauron—the “Lord” of the book’s title—stood for Stalin. “As for any inner meaning or ‘message,’” he wrote in the foreword to the revised second edition of 1966, “it has in the intention of the author none.” Tolkien was charmingly frank about what he wanted to do. “The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them.” This would have seemed reasonable coming from the mouth of Homer in answer to a question about the “Odyssey.” ....

Like many of his generation, he cared little for the ultrapermissive aspect of the 1960s, Mr. Taylor tells us, “whether the decade manifested itself in the Beatles, high taxation or the Beautiful People in hippy glad-rags who could now be seen wandering through central Oxford”—quite a few of them carrying copies of The Lord of the Rings. ....

A different perspective on sudden fame is found in his remark to a reporter that many young people “are involved in the stories in a way that I am not.” .... (more)

James Campbell, "Tolkien’s Affinity for the Old," The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 30, 2016.