An extended review of a 2023 book by Jeremy W. Johnston
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Hesed & Emet Publishing, 2023. 251 pages. $20 (e-book $10)
As a longtime fan of the Lord of the Rings books and movies, and knowing a bit about Tolkien’s life, I expected to be quite familiar with the material in a biography of the famous fantasy writer. But this biography by Jeremy Johnston proved me wrong. Not only does his book weave together a compelling portrait of Tolkien’s remarkable life and thought in a fresh way, but it carries the narrative forward at a steady, confident pace.
The book’s chapters are divided into four sections that cover various seasons and aspects of his life. Johnston, a literature instructor in Hamilton, Ont., leans on a handful of classic biographies to ground the central narrative in solid scholarship while making excursions into a panoply of different topics such as industrialization, the famous Nazi letter, fairy-stories, friendship with C.S. Lewis, pretending to be Father Christmas, and more.
I was delighted to learn, for example, that the distinctive booming voice of Treebeard (“Hrum, Hroom”) was inspired by Lewis’ own voice, and that the hero of Lewis’ Space Trilogy, Professor Ransom, was inspired by Tolkien.
As to the length, the book is ideal for a popular readership, with each modestly sized chapter unfolding another interesting aspect of Tolkien’s life and work without getting bogged down in minutia, and footnotes pointing the more curious reader to further resources. Another strength is the way the author weaves quotes from other biographers, Tolkien’s contemporaries and his letters to illustrate the narrative. The result is a rich tapestry of voices telling the story.
Johnston’s distinctive contribution to the sizable collection of books about J.R.R. Tolkien is that he keeps his eye ever on Tolkien’s Christian faith. Many works depicting his life – including recent biographies and a 2019 film – downplay or leave unexplored the depth and pervasive influence of his Christian convictions. In contrast to these approaches, Johnston’s biography is intended “to show readers that Tolkien’s faith was central to his personal and familial life, as well as his professional pursuits and – most importantly – his creative imagination.”
The success of The Lord of the Rings presents us with a question: how is it that, a quarter of the way into the 21st century, this British philologist (expert on languages) born in 1892 still speaks so powerfully through his fiction?
Johnston’s book makes clear that it is no accident. Tolkien’s work has resonated with readers because he, as much as anyone, understood human nature and the inherent power of stories that are shaped like the Story, the gospel. I expect readers will be surprised how thoroughly Christian Tolkien’s approach to writing was, how deeply he thought about the nature of stories and how much richness there is to be found in his work.
It’s an unfortunate hallmark of the evangelical approach to literature that we tend to focus on the surface elements and miss the significance of a work’s deeper structure. In some of our circles the Lord of the Rings is dismissed as a sub-Christian work because it includes elements of magic and lacks the allegorical clarity of Pilgrim’s Progress or The Chronicles of Narnia.
But a work of art can be Christian in different ways and to different degrees. What such detractors fail to realize is that they have unwittingly adopted a disenchanted and rather modern mindset.
Johnston, as a Protestant Evangelical and a professor of literature, is ideally placed to help fellow Evangelicals recover an older, better and dare I say more Christian imagination. Readers simply cannot fully understand Tolkien’s work without grasping his view of the role of myth and of fairy-stories. And as this book treats these themes repeatedly and robustly, it will be a great help to this end.
The only minor criticisms I have to offer are that, in some cases, the insertion of Scripture passages felt a bit forced and interrupted the flow of the narrative. Another oddity was that, in an effort to defend Tolkien against accusations of sexism, the author listed the strong female characters found in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, including – inexplicably – the monstrous spider Shelob. I hesitate to speak for women, but I think I am on solid ground when I say Shelob is hardly a credit to her sex. But these are mere quibbles.
I am glad to see a Canadian evangelical author and publisher deliver this excellent resource. Christians ought rightly to claim and celebrate Tolkien as a champion of Christ-imbibed imaginative myth-making. May the Lord give us more writers like Tolkien, and more biographies like this one.
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