304 pages
English language
Published June 8, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin.
I found this biography illuminated many aspects of Tolkien's life and helped round out Tolkien's qualities as a family man, academic, and author (or "sub-creator" as he would say). Although Tolkien despised biography as a genre, asserting that one can learn little about fiction from studying the author, Carpenter judiciously assesses both Tolkien's strengths and major foibles.
1) [On politics] ''I am not a ''democrat'', if only because ''humility'' and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power # and then we get and are getting slavery.''
2) [On Beowulf and its handling by literary critics] ''A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So …
1) [On politics] ''I am not a ''democrat'', if only because ''humility'' and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power # and then we get and are getting slavery.''
2) [On Beowulf and its handling by literary critics] ''A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover where the man's distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: ''This tower is most interesting.'' But they also said (after pushing it over): ''What a muddle it is in!'' And even the man's descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: ''He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion.'' But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.''
3) [In 1941] ''[In] the Germans we have enemies whose virtues (and they are virtues) of obedience and patriotism are greater than ours in the mass. I have in this War a burning private grudge against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler for ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.''
