Random praise for two Tolkien biographies

So, been doing some research on Tolkien's curricular changes at Oxford in the late 1920s, and so I've been going through Raymond Edwards's biography Tolkien, which is absolutely fantastic on these issues. I'm struck again by how good & useful this book is. A clear love of academic detail, a careful knowledge of everyone whom he mentions even in passing, but also smartly restrained in drawing connections -- often illuminating ones -- and interpreting the known facts.

And while I'm praising biographies, let me give a shout out to Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond's Chronology and Reader's Guide. Unlike maybe Edwards's biography, these are hardly an unknown set of books, I know, but there's just so much to be said for their format: 2,300 pages of pure facts without all the interpretative apparatus and story-telling of a normal biography. This really opens up the possibilities for researcher's asking unusual questions that a normal biography wouldn't even consider.

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