The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide

• 1. Introduction

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  The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide is a reference work that, by its 2017 edition, ran to 2720 pages across three volumes. Its first volume alone is a chronology of one man's life, stretched across 936 pages in that later edition. The man is Tolkien. The two people who built this monument are a husband and wife team, Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond. What does it take to track a single life in this much detail? And why would the authors deliberately refuse to write about hobbits, elves, or Middle-earth at all? The answers lie in two volumes published in 2006, in the scholars who reviewed them, and in a revised edition that grew larger still.

• 2. Two Lives, One Subject

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  Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond worked as a husband and wife team, and the J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide was not their first joint project on the author. In 2005 they published The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion. The 2006 Companion and Guide followed directly from that earlier work. Their approach was reference rather than narrative. The two-volume set treated Tolkien and Tolkien studies as its field, organising what was known into a structured guide. The pair were described in one review as two highly regarded veterans of Tolkien studies, a standing that shaped how their work was received.

• 3. Chronology And Reader's Guide

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  Volume 1, titled Chronology, presented the detail of Tolkien's life across 800 pages in the first edition. Volume 2, the Reader's Guide, gathered information on people, places, organisations, biographical topics, literary topics, and writings by Tolkien. The preface drew a sharp line around the work's purpose. It stated that the book is not a handbook of his invented lands and characters. That choice meant the Reader's Guide carried no entries on the fictional figures of Middle-earth. Where interpretation went beyond what Tolkien or his son Christopher had written, the work tended to cite scholars such as Verlyn Flieger and Tom Shippey. The result aimed at the whole of Tolkien's actual life rather than the world he imagined.

• 4. Growing In The Telling

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  David Oberhelman, writing in Mythlore, judged the first edition undoubtedly a seminal if not the definitive reference work on the Professor. He borrowed a phrase from Tolkien himself, noting that in true Tolkien fashion, the book grew in the telling. In Oberhelman's view, the breadth of coverage and the authority of the documentation would make the volumes an invaluable supplement to Humphrey Carpenter's classic 1977 biography, and to the authors' own 2005 Reader's Companion. He described the work as focused on Tolkien himself, covering people, places and things linked to the author. Its arguments, he wrote, were presented in a balanced way, and its discussions were always informative as well as entertaining. He closed by calling it truly a monumental achievement.

• 5. A Life In Diaristic Detail

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  John Garth, reviewing in Tolkien Studies, called the work a super-heavyweight contribution by two highly regarded veterans of Tolkien studies. Garth set it against Michael D. C. Drout's The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, allowing that Drout might have the edge on matters of criticism while Scull and Hammond were best on biographical matters. The encyclopedic structure, in his reading, rightly avoided entries on fictional people, places, and totems. He contrasted this with Robert Foster's The Complete Guide to Middle-earth, which had incautiously adopted that fictional approach. Garth saw the book ambitiously aiming to cover the whole of Tolkien's life in diaristic detail. He compared this to The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, which did the same for 1944, the year Tolkien wrote repeatedly to his son Christopher about small events in his life.

• 6. The Edition That Grew Again

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  The 2017 edition expanded the work from two volumes into three. Volume 1, Chronology, extended the record of Tolkien's life from 800 pages to 936. Volumes 2 and 3 carried the Reader's Guide, now split into Part I covering A to M and Part II covering N to Z. Jason Fisher, writing in Tolkien Studies, noted that early reviewers had been correct to predict the lasting value of the work. He called it an indispensable resource alongside the pair's other books, especially for matters of biography and bibliography. Fisher endorsed the earlier praise from Oberhelman and Garth, saying it was still deserved. He recorded that many defects and oversights in the first edition had been fixed, including running headwords at the top of each page and a list of the topics covered. The expansion drew on years of material the authors had gathered on their website.