An Introduction to Tolkien

Few writers have affected people’s imaginations as much as J. R. R. Tolkien. I know that if I read a story and a goblin, troll, or dragon comes onto the scene my mind goes back to images of The Hobbit, or Lord of the Rings, so a biography of Tolkien’s life was appealing to me. Mark Horne’s J.R.R. Tolkien delivered on what I expected going into it.

What did I want to learn by reading this? I wanted to read about how he came up with such an elaborate world. At its best this short biography showed how art imitated life for Tolkien – how the events of his life lent to inspiration for events that happened to the characters in his tales. While at times it was dry, and even repetitive covering the same event more than once (it even felt as if I read the same sentence more than once), it was still engaging.

Horne’s biography also does a good job of building the excitement when Tolkien finally meets success with The Hobbit. He shows a picture of a real man who encounters wild success, and handles it quite well.

The short length of this book made it difficult to paint an in-depth portrait of the man. This is not hagiography by any means, it does show Tolkien’s shortcomings, but there is so much that seems to only be implied, but it spent probably an equal amount of time showing his good qualities. This would be a good resource to introduce you to Tolkien, but you couldn’t really walk away and say that you knew the man after reading it.

It almost serves as a short commentary on what happened behind the scenes.

I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255