J.R.R. Tolkien thought biography a waste of time, distrusted literary critics and guarded his privacy like a dragon sitting on a hoard. So, naturally, half a century after his death, the biographers keep coming, each one creeping into the mountain with a burglar’s hopeful expression and a publisher’s contract. The latest is D.J. Taylor, whose The King Under the Mountain: In Search of J.R.R. Tolkien came out from Constable in the UK in September and reached America on 3 November through Pegasus Books, which is why it’s suddenly all over X.
Taylor is a well-qualified burglar. His Orwell: The Life won the Whitbread biography prize in 2003, and he went back for a second go two decades later with Orwell: The New Life, so he knows his way around a mid-century English writer who built an invented language into an invented world. There’s a pleasing symmetry in the Orwell man turning to Tolkien. One gave us Newspeak, the other Quenya, and only one of them wanted his made-up tongue to sound lovely.
This isn’t a cradle-to-grave life. Humphrey Carpenter’s 1977 biography remains the only authorised one, and Taylor isn’t trying to replace it. Instead, he alternates eleven broadly biographical chapters with nine shorter essays on subjects such as faith, poetry and fairy stories, picking at the myths Tolkien built around himself and at the social, political and cultural world of the Oxford don who produced Middle-earth. The publisher bills it as part biography, part critical study and part fan’s notes, which is a tricky three-way balance. Most Tolkien books manage one of those. A few manage none.
The title, of course, is borrowed from the dwarf kings of Erebor, which is either a sly comment on a man who lived inside his own mountain of philology or simply a very good title. Probably both.
The early notices have been kind. The Times reckons Taylor is the right man for the job, the Telegraph’s reviewer called it the most entertaining study of Tolkien he’d read, and the Literary Review found it fascinating. The Spectator was warmer about the whole than the parts, calling it a perceptive addition to the field while finding the essays a mixed bag, and it singled out one line of Taylor’s that’s worth the cover price alone: Tolkien, he argues, is the worst person in the world to ask what his books are about. Anyone who has read the Professor’s foreword announcing that he cordially disliked allegory, in all its manifestations, will be nodding along.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we’d very much like to read it properly before passing judgement, so consider this a polite note slipped under Constable’s door. We promise not to wake the dragon.
The King Under the Mountain is out now in hardback, ebook and audiobook, read by Simon Slater, from Constable in the UK and Pegasus Books in the US. Tolkien would have hated the fuss, of course. But he’d also have hated trending on X, and here we all are.
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