What sets Humphrey Carpenter's books apart in the study of JRRT?

[Olorgando]

Having just re-read John Garth's 2003 "Tolkien and the Great War", I got to thinking about the various authors who have written about JRRT.

Humphrey Carpenter is unique in more than one way. He is the official biographer, he wrote (or edited) three books about quite different aspects of JRRT's life, and he got an early start.
"Biography" is from 1977, the same year the Silmarillion was published, "Inklings" from 1978, and "Letters" from 1981.
As far as I know, there have not been any revised / expanded editions of any of these books. This would contrast with for example Tom Shippey, whose first edition of "The Road to Middle-earth" dates from 1982, but who published a second (1992) and a third (2003) edition, each revised and expanded from its predecessors - mainly due to the publication by Christopher Tolkien of "The History of Middle-earth".
So perhaps some parts of Carpenter's books have now become dated?

Then the question of understanding what. "Biography", "Inklings" and for example Garth's "Great War" seem to shed light more on JRRT's life, while for example Shippey, Verlyn Flieger, of course Christopher Tolkien, shed more light on JRRT's works.

"Letters" seems to me to do both.

Thoughts?

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

A new edition of the Letters was published when the films came out. Paperback only, I believe. IIRC it contained one additional letter, in the new introduction. I didn’t buy it. I know of at least several more letters having come to light since the first edition, so was disappointed by their absence.

What's needed is an entirely revised edition, collecting all known letters, and inserting them in their proper places. I'd also like to see the cuts Carpenter saw fit to make in some of the letters restored.

Carpenter made some valuable contributions to Tolkieniana, at an early stage of its development, but scholarship moves on, and I feel his early work has been surpassed. There's at least one massive recent work on the Inklings, for example.

 

[Olorgando]

Just a bit of trivia, perhaps. Even Garth mentions JRRT's supposed paternal ancestry in Saxony. Now in post-reunion (since 1990, almost 30 years!) Germany, there are three states with "Saxony" in their state names: Lower Saxony (a lot of which belonged to the dissolved state of Prussia, and which was in the 1949-founded Federal Republic of, aka Western, Germany), Saxony-Anhalt, more to the east and a part of the GDR from 1949-1990, and Saxony "proper", easternmost of the three and also a part of the GDR.
Thing is, JRRT's ancestry seems rather to have derives from East Prussia, near the city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad in that Russian enclave separated from the rest of Russia by present-day Lithuania and Poland) which was the home of one of Germany's premier philosophers Immanuel Kant.