J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

by Humphrey Carpenter

‘She was (and knew she was) my Lúthien. I will say no more now. But I should like ere long to have a long talk with you. For if as seems probable I shall never write any ordered biography – it is against my nature, which expresses itself about things deepest felt in tales and myths – someone close in heart to me should know something about things that records do not record: the dreadful sufferings of our childhoods, from which we rescued one another, but could not wholly heal wounds that later often proved disabling; the sufferings that we endured after our love began – all of which (over and above personal weaknesses) might help to make pardonable, or understandable, the lapses and darknesses which at times marred our lives – and to explain how these never touched our depths nor dimmed the memories of our youthful love. For ever (especially when alone) we still met in the woodland glade and went hand in hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting.’

Tolkien recognised that the character of Ransom, the philologist hero of Lewis’s stories, was perhaps modelled in part on himself. He wrote to his son Christopher in 1944: ‘As a philologist I may have some part in him, and recognize some of my opinions and ideas Lewisified in him.’

C. S. Lewis died on 22 November 1963, aged sixty-four. A few days later, Tolkien wrote to his daughter Priscilla: ‘So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age – like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one: this feels like an axe-blow near the roots.’