The King Under The Mountain

Does the world need another Tolkien biography? Well yes, if it is as refreshing, broadly scoped and interestingly written as this one.

To be fair, it isn’t a biography in the Humphrey Carpenter sense, still less a hagiography. It does cover Tolkien’s life, but that is only a third of the book. It also takes a much more, shall we say, sceptical look at his life, for example, the influence of the Inklings both on the wider world and on Tolkien himself. We also see how little there is of Tolkien’s own wife in his story, almost all told only through comments about her illnesses.

There is a similar healthy scepticism about the actual works, acknowledging that, no, the Silmarillion doesn’t come together as a coherent novel and that the poetry isn’t really that good; while at the same time acknowledging both how good the Lord of the Rings is and the huge influence it has had on modern popular culture.

There are interesting quotes from various cultural figures about their own relationship with the stories, and an eye-opening catalogue of Middle Earth references that the author encountered (without specifically looking for them) during the year that it took to write the book.

The author is himself a novelist, as well as a nonfiction author, and his own storytelling skills do come to the fore – this is written in an engaging form comma never dull or dry, and I got through it in a surprisingly short time.

An interesting and valuable addition to anyone’s Tolkien related bookshelf.