Tolkien Book

With Tolkien fever gripping us as the first, highly successful Lord of the Ringsmovie takes the box office by storm--and the original novels begin to sell in the same massive quantities as they did in the 60s and 70s--the timing could not be better for this fascinating and revealing biography of the "writer of the century" (according to a recent poll). When The Fellowship of the Ring first appeared in 1954, the Sunday Times famously said that the world would be divided into two kinds of people: "Those who have read The Lord of the Rings and those who are going to." While the obligation for us to take such a position may have passed, we now see the phenomenally talented author as the most important writer in fantasy, whose massively ambitious magnum opus has created an army of writers aspiring to the Master’s crown. The talented biographer Michael White creates an assiduously detailed, colourful and evocative picture of the man and h! is times. Born in South Africa in 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien moved with his mother to a rented cottage in Sarehole near Birmingham, then an undisturbed, Arcadian spot. Ronald and his brother played in the forests, creating an imaginative world of wizards and dragons and sowing the seeds for the world of Middle Earth which the author was to describe so richly as an adult. In the grim horrors of the First World War, Tolkien saw the slaughter of the Battle of the Somme, which was to inform the darker currents of his books--few writers of fantasy convey the continent-spanning terrors of conflict so tellingly. After the war, Tolkien became Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford where he wrote The Hobbit, and the three books of the most influential trilogy in all fantasy writing. Michael White was science editor of GQ, and offers a penetrating, compelling picture of a shy but remarkable figure--a man whose influence in literature is still growing. In a previous incarnation, Michael White was a member of the Thompson Twins, but don’t hold that against him--this is a nigh-definitive biography.--Barry ForshawRead More