Sunday Books & Culture - Fiction (Reference)
Drew Gallagher recommends Tom Racine’s “Doomed to Die: An A-Z of Death in Tolkien” as a gift for any Tolkien fan.
DOOMED TO DIE: AN A-Z of DEATH in TOLKIEN
By Tom Racine
Reviewed by Drew Gallagher
Published by William Morrow (November 11, 2025)
Hardcover $15.59
Nothing quite captures the holiday spirit like death. Especially death that can conveniently fit as a stocking stuffer and be read in under 15 minutes.
Illustrator Tom Racine has released “Doomed to Die: An A-Z of Death in Tolkien” which may just be the perfect gift for that budding cartoonist, poet, or Peter Thiel convert in your family. Racine goes through Tolkien, alphabetically of course, and writes a brief verse about a character in the vast Tolkien universe who left us too soon. Or, in the case of Gollum, too late.
Each verse contains an illustration of the character and their demise, although the author does take some necessary liberties to bring in known characters who may not have died in the pages but were touched by death. For A: “A is for Arwen broken by sorrows.” And Racine’s rhyme scheme is sometimes imperfect (“B is Boromir punctured by arrows”) but even Tolkien’s world can be imperfect. Plus, at heart, Racine is an illustrator so a visual rhyme is fine.
His illustrations are brilliant even though their beginnings were humble as Racine notes in an Afterward he titles “Inspiration.” The process he outlines is interesting and also adds much-needed stuffing for a book that would have been impossibly light and impossible to market without a peek behind the artistic birthing of the book. There is also a helpful “Who’s Who” at the end, so if you’re not up on your Silmarillion you can quickly find who the character is and where they reside in the lore of Middle Earth.
As many on the far right of the American political divide attempt to fly their nerd flag over the J.R.R. Tolkien world, “Doomed to Die” provides a quick reminder that beneath all of the Tolkien stories there was one recurring theme that was not about living forever, like the elves, or hating Orcs as a precursor to immigrants.
“Stories—frankly, human stories are always about one thing—death. The inevitability of death,” said Tolkien in an interview with the BBC in 1968.
Tolkien has mesmerized readers for nearly 70 years. Racine’s illustrative requiem continues that magic.
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