Nor that he had the greatest difficulty getting a subsidiary branch of it into finite shape as The Lord of the Rings (part of the often-revised parent material is to be published this fall). It is not surprising that Tolkien soon envisioned the accumulating body of lore as something he was virtually discovering, not inventing. The Quenya (High-Elven) language came first, and at once implied the history and mythology of a people who spoke it, together with the languages of other peoples bound up in their destiny. Carpenter's account of the evolution of Middle-Earth makes extraordinary sense in this emotional pattern.

Deep loyalty to the wife whom he never permitted real access to his own intellectual concerns obsessive loyalty to the intricate networks of detail involved in his professional researches. Loyalty to the two beloved friends killed in the Great Wax and to the idealistic fellowship broken by their deaths. Loyalty to his mother's Catholicism and to her West Midland ancestry hence to the countryside and the ancient speech of that once-beautiful region. In the inner life that Carpenter suggests beneath them, we ultimately discern a curious and moving loyalty. Tolkien was raised in an idyllic Warwickshire village and later in dreary Birmingham early manifested a precocious passion for the history and structure of languages was orphaned at twelve by his mother's death married his first love just before going off to the Great War brought up four children with her during a long Oxford career as one of the most distinguished philologists of his (or any other) day. Carpenter concisely narrates a placid life that began in 1892 in-of all places-Bloemfontein, South Africa. The Tolkien industry continues unabated Humphrey Carpenter's gentle authorized biography is one of the few recent contributions to deviate into sense.

Tolkien the authorized biography