King Under the Mountain: In Search of J. R. R. Tolkien

A sparkling exploration of the myths that J. R. R. Tolkien created around himself, examining the social and political worlds that surrounded the creator of Middle-Earth, by award-winning biographer D. J. Taylor.

In the past seven decades J.R.R. Tolkien’s major works—The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion—have sold over half a billion copies, been made into prodigiously successful Hollywood movies, and had an incalculable influence on the generations of fantasy writers who followed in their wake. 

But Tolkien himself remains a mystery—a deeply conservative Oxford don specializing in an abstruse subject and a diehard Roman Catholic who regarded biography as a waste of time, was suspicious of literary criticism, and jealously guarded his private life from an intrusive media. Of no major twentieth century literary figure is so little known.

The King Under the Mountain is an attempt to decipher this puzzle. Part biography, part critical study, and part fan’s notes offering insight into the deepest recesses of Tolkien’s imaginative world, it explores the myths that Tolkien created around himself, examines the social and political contexts in which he operated and, above all, investigates the kind of person—and the kind of writer—that Tolkien imagined himself to be.