Snapping on the heels of the literary and marketing phenomena of Harry Potter, the magisterial might of The Lord of the Rings is now in the cinemas and novelty stores as well as the bookshops it has occupied for the past 50 years.
Waterstones has reported a 600 per cent increase in sales of the book since the film hype started. The name Tolkien is synonymous with very big money in a way its late owner was denied nearly all his life.
To capitalise on the mania, a new biography of J.R.R. Tolkien has been published by Little, Brown. Meanwhile, Humphrey Carpenter's definitive version of 1977 and Tom Shippey's Tolkien: Author of the Century have been re-issued in paperback. Tolkien's life, that of a 19th-century academic living in the 20th century, has inspired fewer accounts than his extraordinary writings, and his path was straight and dull compared to those of his fantasy creations.
The newest biography is written by a former member of British 1980s pop group the Thompson Twins: the impulse to end its review on that note is strong.
For Michael White, the ex-twin (he actually had the misfortune to leave the group before they became mildly famous), is an industrious and enthusiastic author of some 20 books, including biographies of Stephen Hawking and Leonardo da Vinci. He also tells us that he became a "Tolkhead" (not his word) in his late teens, when he read The Lord of the Rings eight times in a row.
White's account of the life of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is a worthy and straightforward narrative. Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, where his English father was a bank official, in 1892. His father died when he was four, leaving Tolkien and his younger brother Hilary to an impoverished upbringing by their mother, Mabel, who compensated for her lack of material wealth by an intense Catholic spirituality. The little family returned to England, where they lived mostly in and around Birmingham, with intervals in semi-rural settings providing the idyllic backdrop to Tolkien's fertile imagination. A key figure in Tolkien's early life was a Catholic priest, Father Francis Xavier Morgan, who was very close to his mother and became a father figure to the two boys. The nature of the relationship could have been teased out a little more. Close relationships between widowed ladies and celibate priests may indeed be chaste, but if they are as close as White claims it was probably interesting and formative. Yet, due to the apparent lack of primary sources throughout the book, we learn little about the priest or the mother, except that Tolkien adored the former and had lasting affection and respect for the latter. He became a devout Catholic himself, to the point of insisting that his fiancΘe, Edith Bratt, convert and, later, to the break-up of his firm friendship with C.S.Lewis when the religion Lewis chose to embrace was his traditional Ulster Protestantism.
Tolkien's life can be summed up in a couple of sentences: he served in the first World War but spent most of it after 1916 suffering from trench fever in England; he became a respected academic at Oxford, had four children, and wrote astonishingly detailed fantasies. What was he like? Not much to go on here. When a worsening of his speech impediment is mentioned towards the end of the book, it is the first time we have heard of it in the text. Some glimpses of the man's personality are given by his reaction to, for example, publisher's revisions of some of his chapters, and the text of a Daily Telegraph interview with him in 1967. In both cases the impudent puppies got 2,000-word dissections of their work for their trouble.
It seems he could be a very difficult man . . . but then, if he was a genius, is not that part of the package? Had he led C.S. Lewis's much less conventional romantic life, for example (spending many of his years with a widow more than 25 years older), he might have fitted that role better. But Tolkien's domestic life was totally standard, and the isolation and loneliness which was his wife's lot (as he wrote, gave lectures and spent many evenings in the company of the brainy chaps, at the Eagle and Child pub), was only what women accepted in those days.
The account of Tolkien the man is flat, but White is much better in the last part of the book where analysis of the writings is concentrated. This is a more fertile field, as many books, and severely academic essays, have been written about The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, often by learned types struggling to appreciate their huge and wide appeal. White can't resist a little sniping at those who have been keen to dismiss the value of the books, and the Germaine Greers and Mark Lawsons who were so distressed when The Lord was voted the most beloved book in not one but three surveys of English readers at the end of the 1990s.
As White says: "Tolkien's writing was never fashionable within the literary fraternity" except for the loyal support of his friend "Jack" Lewis, even when this was thrown back in Lewis's face. "His contemporaries, writers like Edmund Wilson (who reads him now?) found favour by writing books that dealt supposedly with deep-rooted human emotion; these authors wanted to make it clear they were addressing 'real issues', investigating the human condition and helping readers to better understand life." Tolkien, White says, did the same thing but in a fictional way that was so unreal it was unacceptable to the gritty post-war school of novelists. He also makes a good point with the inclusion of Tolkien as one of that disparate group who instinctively tapped Jung's "collective unconscious" with regard to popular culture. Like Steven Spielberg, the Beatles and Picasso, Tolkien, who had no patience with modern technology and forms of entertainment, somehow had the recipe for something people would love.
White is a former science editor of GQ magazine, which could explain his frequent inclination to simplify to the point of gaucherie (his description of the start of the First World War is far inferior to that in Terry Deary's Horrible Histories. And don't get me started on the literary misspellings . . . George Elliot, for heaven's sake, literary cannon with two ns, does anybody proof these books, mutter).
Anyone who has had to write science for a general-interest publication has a formidable job, and it would be understandable if White had developed a talk-down style. Alternatively the book is aimed at older children and adolescents, hungry for news of their idols. There is a good index, a reading and website list.
However, the Tolkien fan in my life, a precocious 11, inquired: "Why do you need to know more about the writer than those bits at the beginnings of books, that say where they live and how many children they have?" Who wants harsh reality about the king of fantasy? The perhaps-genius Professor Tolkien has lived since 1973 in another realm, maybe more to his liking than the modern world: for a good Catholic of his achievements he surely deserved a Middle-earth type of heaven.
Angela Long is an Irish Times journalist