Christopher Tolkien

• 1. Introduction

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  Christopher Tolkien spent 45 years editing his father's unpublished writings, and in doing so became something more than a keeper of manuscripts. He was born on the 21st of November 1924 in Leeds, the youngest son of J. R. R. Tolkien. By the time his father died in 1973, Christopher was already the named literary executor, the man trusted to bring an enormous, unfinished mythology into the world. What he found waiting for him was not a tidy archive. It was a labyrinth. Some texts were written on odd scraps of paper half a century old. Fair drafts were scrawled over half-erased first drafts. Character names shifted partway through the same document. He described the collection as "a vast repository and labyrinth of story, of poetry, of philosophy, and of philology." The question that would follow him for decades was whether he edited that labyrinth or invented it.

• 2. RAF Pilot to Oxford Scholar

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  At 17, Christopher Tolkien won a place to study English at Trinity College, Oxford. He managed a year and a half before his call-up papers arrived. He joined the Royal Air Force in July 1943, and by the start of 1944 he had been sent to South Africa for flight training. He earned his wings as a fighter pilot and was commissioned in January 1945. A posting back in England followed in February 1945, at Market Drayton in Shropshire, and in June of that year he switched to the Fleet Air Arm. He resumed his Oxford degree while still in the service, in April 1946, and was demobilised by the end of that year. His B.A. came in 1948. His B.Litt. followed in 1953, completed under the philologist Gabriel Turville-Petre. That training as a philologist would prove decisive. Scholars have since noted that he applied exactly those editorial skills to his father's Middle-earth writings, treating them as if they were real-world legends awaiting scholarly reconstruction.

• 3. Inside the Inklings

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  Long before he took up editorial duties, Christopher Tolkien was already embedded in his father's creative world. As a child he listened to the earliest tales of Bilbo Baggins, stories that would eventually become The Hobbit. As a teenager and young adult he offered feedback on The Lord of the Rings during its 15-year gestation. He also redrew his father's working maps for inclusion in the published book. His father described his invitation to join the Inklings, the literary discussion group, as "a quite unprecedented honour"; Christopher was 21 when he received it. The elder Tolkien called his son his "chief critic and collaborator." In 1954, the same year The Lord of the Rings began publication, Christopher became a lecturer in English language at St Catherine's Society, Oxford. He later moved to New College, Oxford in 1963, following in his father's footsteps as a lecturer and tutor. In 1967, his father named him not only literary executor but, more specifically, co-author of The Silmarillion.

• 4. The Labyrinth Manuscript

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  After J. R. R. Tolkien's death in 1973, Christopher carried a large quantity of legendarium manuscripts to his Oxfordshire home, converting a barn into a workspace. He brought in a young writer named Guy Gavriel Kay to help. By 1975, the two had discovered how complex the task was likely to be. J. R. R. Tolkien had always intended to publish The Silmarillion alongside The Lord of the Rings in the 1950s, but a publisher had rejected it. When he died, parts of it were in a finished state. Many were not. Christopher later described the full scope in a foreword: "By the time of my father's death the amount of writing in existence on the subject of the Three Ages was huge in quantity... disordered, more full of beginnings than of ends, and varying in content from heroic verse in the ancient English alliterative metre to severe historical analysis of his own extremely difficult languages." In September 1975, he resigned from New College to work exclusively on editing those writings. He and his family moved to France, and the task consumed him for the next four decades.

• 5. Editor, Author, or Both

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  Christopher Tolkien and Kay produced a single-volume Silmarillion for publication in 1977. Its success drove the publication of Unfinished Tales in 1980, and then the far larger 12-volume History of Middle-earth between 1983 and 1996. In 1977, he wrote in his foreword to The Silmarillion that he had set himself "to work out a single text, selecting and arranging in such a way as seemed to me to produce the most coherent and internally self-consistent narrative." By 1981, the scholar Randel Helms had read that statement as proof that "The Silmarillion in the shape that we have it is the invention of the son not the father." Christopher Tolkien pushed back in the foreword to the 1983 Book of Lost Tales, calling the uncertainty about editorial intrusion "a stumbling-block and a source of much misapprehension." Yet in that same foreword he admitted that publishing The Silmarillion without a frame story, "no suggestion of what it is and how (within the imagined world) it came to be", was "certainly debatable." He added: "This I now think to have been an error." By 2012, he went further, admitting "I had had to invent some passages" and recounting a dream in which his father was anxiously searching for something. He realised in horror that it was The Silmarillion. The scholar Vincent Ferré concluded that Christopher Tolkien should be regarded as "a writer in his own right, and not only as an 'editor' of his father's manuscripts."

• 6. The Great Tales and Later Work

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  The Children of Húrin appeared in April 2007. Its story traced back to 1918, making it one of J. R. R. Tolkien's earliest inventions; the father had worked on it most recently between 1951 and 1957 before abandoning it. Christopher Tolkien assembled the published version from sources scattered across The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle-earth. Beren and Lúthien followed in 2017, and The Fall of Gondolin in 2018. Together these three constituted what J. R. R. Tolkien had called the three Great Tales of the Elder Days. Alongside that work, Christopher Tolkien edited his father's medieval writings that had nothing to do with Middle-earth. The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, a verse retelling of the Norse Völsung cycle, appeared in May 2009. The Fall of Arthur came in May 2013, and Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary in May 2014. Earlier in his career he had also published The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise in 1960, and had edited Geoffrey Chaucer tales with the scholar Nevill Coghill. In 2016, the Bodley Medal recognised his contributions to literature, culture, science, and communication.

• 7. The Film Dispute

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  Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy, released from 2001, drew a sharp public response from Christopher Tolkien. In a 2012 interview with Le Monde, he criticised the films directly: "They gutted the book, making an action film for 15 to 25-year-olds." In 2008, he commenced legal proceedings against New Line Cinema, which he claimed owed his family £80 million in unpaid royalties. He and New Line reached an undisclosed settlement in September 2009, and he withdrew his legal objection to The Hobbit films. The dispute extended into his family. His son Simon, a barrister and novelist, had become involved as an advisor with the Lord of the Rings series, a position that reportedly put him at odds with his father. The two later reconciled; Simon dedicated one of his novels to his father. Christopher Tolkien's first wife, the sculptor Faith Lucy Tilly Faulconbridge, whom he married in 1951 and divorced in 1967, has work featured in the National Portrait Gallery. He had married Baillie Klass in 1967, and they moved to the south of France in 1975, where she edited J. R. R. Tolkien's The Father Christmas Letters for posthumous publication. Christopher Tolkien died on the 16th of January 2020, in Draguignan, Var, France, at the age of 95, having spent his final decades in the country where he had taken citizenship decades before.