ON THE SHOULDERS OF HUMPHREY CARPENTER: RECONSIDERING BIOGRAPHICAL REPRESENTATION AND SCHOLARLY PERCEPTION OF EDITH TOLKIEN

• Published in: Mythlore 2019-04, Vol.37 (134), p.39-74
• Main Author: Duplessis, Nicole M
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Allusion; Ambiguity; American literature; Attitudes; Authorship; Bibliographic literature; Biographies; British & Irish literature; Creativity; Editors; English literature; Exegesis & hermeneutics; Fate; Females; Fiction; Gender; History; Lewis, C S (1898-1963); Literary criticism; Literary devices; Literary influences; Logic; Marriage; Misogyny; Narrative techniques; Pedagogy; Personal relationships; Piano; Plot (Narrative); Source materials; Spouses; Symbolism; Symbols; Teaching; Tolkien, Christopher; Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel (1892-1973); Williams, Charles; Women; Writers
• ISSN: 0146-9339

IN THe NINTH AND SEVENTH DECADES SINCE THE PUBLICATION of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, respectively, twenty-first century Tolkien studies continue to be shaped by scholarship that causes us to review, rethink, and reconsider what we know about these two works, The Silmarillion, Tolkien's legendarium, his languages and creative process, and in some cases, the author himself. Recently, Tolkien scholarship has been consolidated in multi-volume collections like Stuart Lee's contribution to Routledge's Critical Assessments of Major Authors series (2017), in important benchmark volumes like Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie Donovan's Perilous and Fair: Women in the Life and Works of J.R.R. Tolkien (2015), and in bibliographies such as Croft's "Bibliographic Resources for Literature Searches on J.R.R. Tolkien" (2016) in the Journal of Tolkien Research and the current and up-to-date "Mythlore Index Plus" compiled by Croft and Edith Crowe. Given the tendency of scholars and critics to rely on Carpenter's account, treating as fact his assumptions, his judgments, and his interpretations of the material that he synthesized during the relatively short process of researching and writing the biography,1 the positioning of Edith Tolkien in Tolkien scholarship as a controversial figure-an elf-maid, a shy, mousy figure, a non-intellectual, an aspiring pianist with thwarted ambitions, a victim of spousal neglect, an invalid, a shrewish, nagging wife-deserves consideration. Comparing female characters in works by Tolkien and Charles Williams, Fredrick and McBride argue that their fictional women "are not based on Tolkien's or William's experience with wives, mothers, and female acquaintances" (107-108), but nevertheless use biography to establish the place of women in the Inklings' lives, thought, and fiction, often contrasting the authors' opinions on and treatment of actual women with their representation of fictional women as mythic and symbolic.