Review of Mark Horne's Biography of Tolkien
(avg. read time: 2–5 mins.)
For our Tolkien Tuesdays this month, I am going to be posting a pair of book reviews to provide a bit of a buffer between my last large-scale Tolkien project and my next large-scale Tolkien project, which will be a biblical and theological commentary on The Lord of the Rings. The first of two book reviews this month is one of Tolkien’s biographies, which I find difficult to review in the way I have done others on this site, but I want to make sure to highlight this book in any case.
Today, I am reviewing this biography:
Mark Horne, J. R. R. Tolkien, Christian Encounters Series (Nashville: Nelson, 2011).
Humphrey Carpenter’s biography is the only “authorized” biography of Tolkien, and the only one written of him while Tolkien lived so that Carpenter could personally interact with Tolkien and his family. But if that was all you read about Tolkien’s life, there is at least one area in which you would have a relatively faint impression of an important dimension of Tolkien’s life: his Christian (specifically Roman Catholic) faith. That is not to say that Carpenter ignores the facts and stories of Tolkien’s Christianity and specifically Catholicity—you will still learn that about Tolkien if you did not know before reading his biography—but he is clearly not all that interested. Various Christian resources have sought to highlight Tolkien’s Christian character as a context for understanding his work, but frankly, they are often shallow themselves.
Horne’s book is a happy exception to this. For a short book (~150 pages in the print version), it is dense with good biographical research and writing. In addition to doing what others have done (as I also do in my book) in arguing that recognizing Tolkien’s faith is important to understanding his works, he also highlights how the formation of Tolkien as a Christian was crucial for him to face the various trials of his life as he did:
Possibly even more important than the Christian theological and literary influences on Tolkien’s writings, the way Christianity helped him deal with the crises and losses in his life made it possible for him to write with maturity and character. The apostle Paul preached that ‘we must through many tribulation enter the kingdom of God’ (Acts 14:22), and it was only through many tribulations that Tolkien reached the point that he could write The Lord of the Rings trilogy—a sequel that grew from but far surpassed his original Hobbit. Tolkien’s faith helped him to persevere in the midst of severe losses and taught him patience as he forced himself to work at his job and support his family even as he wished he could make further progress in his writing. His faith transformed him as a person and a writer. (Introduction)
As Horne’s biography illustrates (with plenty of other interesting information about people besides Tolkien as well), Tolkien had many such trials, including losing both of his parents by the time he was twelve, with the faith of his mother who died so young making an especially significant impact on his own development as a Christian. Then there were the trials involving his relationship with Edith, followed by her trials in becoming a Catholic. Then there was what he faced in WW1, including the deaths of two of his closest friends. Then there were more mundane struggles that came with him feeling the burden of carrying out his (sub-)creative vision (a burden possibly made heavier by the fact that he felt he owed it to his dead friends) but being frustrated in the realization of the same by academic responsibilities and conflicts with publishers.
Horne explores these and many other aspects of Tolkien’s life. The first five chapters cover Tolkien’s life to the end of his participation in WW1 and the second set of five chapters cover the rest of his life and his legacy. Given one of Horne’s chief focuses (quoted above), it is unsurprising that there is this sort of disproportionate focus (i.e., relative to the number of years addressed). Tolkien’s own writings, including those that best exemplify his Christian formation, are much more copious in the times covered by the latter half of the book, but that also makes the contextualizing information in the first half all the more helpful, since you get less of this information from his letters. It is also the trials he went through earlier in life that shaped, for example, how he comforted his sons in the midst of WW2 while they were deployed, and so it is certainly fitting for Horne to emphasize what he does.
It is difficult to say a lot more about this biography without reciting biographical info I have gone over elsewhere in my review of the Tolkien biopic or in my forthcoming book (stay tuned). It is without question the best biographical resource I have read to date on Tolkien as concerns his Christian faith. It is a worthwhile supplement to Carpenter’s biography and others that are more broadly focused, although it does serve as a general biography of Tolkien as well. Horne also provides good framing for contextualizing Tolkien’s biography and legacy. If you are interested in Tolkien the Christian and how he was shaped as a Christian as a context in which to understand his works, I think this is an important book to have for your library as a popular-level work with solid research backing it.