Tolkien: The Creator of Middle Earth is a wonderful biography by Catherine McIlwaine.
On my last birthday, I was in the Bodleian library gift shop and my better half bought me this wonderful book as a late gift. She left me in Tolkien’s favourite pub while she went shopping.
When I sat in The Eagle and Child and opened the biography, I was immediately struck by a hand drawn map on the inside cover. The complete map of Middle Earth appears to have been drawn with pencils and black and blue biros. It includes corrections and scribblings and is truly wonderful.
As I sat leafing through the book, I came across a note from C. S. Lewis, which he wrote after their first encounter at a faculty meeting while both teaching at the university. “No harm in him: only needs a smack or so,” and Lewis was a boxer, so, a smack would have been memorable. Despite this acrimonious start, the two became firm friends and formed The Inklings, a literary club who used to meet in the pub. It gives me jitters to think I was in the place where it all began.
The treasures of the book are infinite and you will need to discover them yourself. That said, the best parts for me are the illustrations. There are several from artists inspired by Middle Earth, but there are also illustrations both from Tolkien and from the Danish Princess, Margrethe, who later became the queen. So good were the princess’s drawings that they were used to illustrate the Folio Society version of The Lord of the Rings published in 1977.
With all the illustrations, for me, the most captivating were the maps. When I start world building for my fantasy novels, I do it with a map. I suspect that the following quote, from Tolkien, is the reason why:
“I wisely started with a map and made the story fit.”
Tolkien’s maps were intricate, comprehensive, and magical to behold. I could have sat in the Eagle and the Child browsing them until the end of days. In fact, I probably would have sat there until I was blotto had Sally not arrived and hauled me out by a very small right ear.
Catherine McIlwaine’s biography, Tolkien: The Maker of Middle Earth comes with 7 out of 5 stars for me. I recommend it to all of you worldbuilders out there as a text that will help you immensely, but I also recommend it to those of you who just like a good book with plenty of illustrations. I suspect fans of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings will already have discovered it.