Hugh, here's my review from 2011 of a book worth getting from the library for some biographical material on Tolkien.
Tolkien by a Colleague and Friend
by Dale Nelson
Arne Zettersten worked with Tolkien on the Oxford Early English Text Society’s multi-volume edition of all seventeen manuscripts of Ancrene Wisse. The first volume appeared in 1962; it was the final major scholarly work released in his lifetime by Tolkien. Zettersten saw the project through to completion in 2000. He has written J. R. R. Tolkien’s Double Worlds and Creative Process: Language and Life, published 2011 by Palgrave Macmillan (xi + 243 pp; ISBN 978-0-230-62314-9; $85).
The book is priced for the scholarly market but is poorly edited. It states that 9 August 1973 was “two weeks before Tolkien’s death,” but Tolkien died 2 Sept. 1973. It refers twice to Biographia Literaria as being written by C. T. Coleridge (pp. 27, 233). Tolkien’s secretary Joy Hill becomes Joe Hill (p. 35). An uncorrected misprint refers to the 1980s when the 1890s must be meant (p. 52). Tolkien’s essay “English and Welsh” is “English and Wales” on p. 161, “England and Wales” on p. 200, and “About the English and the Welsh” on p.232. We read of “Niemor” (for Nienor, a character in Tolkien’s Túrin cycle, p. 35), “buriel-mounds” (p. 13), and the bookstore chain Barnes and Nobles (p. 39), and that “today’s individual… have [sic] lost a lot of historical knowledge” (p. 221). The style bogs down: “the new digital picture archive from the [Peter Jackson] film production [was used] for all kinds of digital manipulation. If we take into account the whole reception of Tolkien’s ideas, we may adopt a different, and maybe unexpected, comprehensive view of his project, particularly if we take into account the effects of his ideas” (p. 217). Few readers will assume with Zettersten that “a radio or TV interview would have created a more relaxed setting [for Tolkien to speak in] than … a social gathering at a pub, or a lively meeting with colleagues after dinner in his own college” (p. 6). One frequently thinks that Zettersten is about to focus on one particular issue, but he draws off to something else. The book is repetitive. It was, apparently, first written in Swedish and the translation is not polished. Och, rather than English and, appears on pp. 174 and 231. The book needed a good editor.
Readers may shrug off such defects if the book brings Tolkien the man close to them and if what it says about Tolkien’s creativity is insightful. The book may be guardedly affirmed on both counts.
Having corresponded with him since May 1959, Zettersten first visited Tolkien in June 1961. He tells his first impressions of Tolkien’s appearance (“surprisingly robust physique,” “natural heartiness” of manner, hair parted on the left and thick in the back, bushy eyebrows, warm handshake, distinctive voice) and recounts his walk from the noisy center of Oxford to Tolkien’s Sandfield Road residence in Headington. These early paragraphs are enjoyable, and it is pleasant in the middle of the book to glimpse Tolkien’s conversational topics ranging from philology to his own subcreation to “various whiskies and their merits” (p. 113). So far as I know Zettersten is the only source in print for the list of eleven books from Tolkien’s schooldays (p. 78). Almost everything that Zettersten says about Tolkien the man, however, is already known from Tolkien’s published letters and books by members of the Tolkien family, John Garth, Peter Gilliver, Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond, Humphrey Carpenter, and others. Zettersten’s book is a useful condensation of their many pages. Zettersten’s affection for Tolkien pervades the book, but perhaps he waited too long to write it; his book mostly lacks the unique anecdotes that readers will have hoped for.
While many readers will welcome a book on Tolkien, a philologist, written by another outstanding philologist, some may fear that it will be too esoteric. It’s not. For example, a nice explanation of “philology” appears on p. 79. (It could have appeared earlier in the book.) One might, again, fear that Zettersten would naturally emphasize philology at the expense of other elements contributing to Tolkien’s creativity, but the book is reasonably balanced. We read of Tolkien being captivated by the Gothic, Finnish, and Welsh languages, but also of his prewar friendships, Tolkien’s love for Edith and the importance of their son Christopher Tolkien as reader of LOTR as it was being written, Tolkien’s Great War experiences, the stimulus of the Inklings, and the role of pictorial art and calligraphy. Zettersten doesn’t let the philological perspective run away with him but uses it. Given his qualifications, one wishes he had commented on Tolkien’s philological essays such as “Sigelwara Land,” “The Devil’s Coach-Horses,” and “Chaucer as Philologist.” Since the “AB Language” in which Ancrene Wisse is written is a specialty of Zettersten’s, he is able to evoke the two scholars’ shared enthusiasm for it. He records too their interest in the fragmentary poem Waldere. He conveys the “code-switching” quality of Tolkien’s mind, adapting a linguistic term for a rapid alternation “between two languages, or between two dialects or between two registers.” Thus, “Tolkien could suddenly flit between the primary and the secondary world without the slightest difficulty or doubt” (p. 113). Yes: Zettersten really does seem to understand how Tolkien’s mind worked -- although I’m still mulling his notion that Tolkien would have published a finished text of The Silmarillion in his lifetime if he had been able to work on the book with a word processor (p. 36). During his last visits with Tolkien, Zettersten perceived that Tolkien realized that he would not see The Silmarillion through to publication.
Other than institutions with special Tolkien collections, libraries do not need to purchase this book.
