Christopher Tolkien
Guardian of his father JRR Tolkien’s creations who edited The Silmarillion and many other works
CHRISTOPHER TOLKIEN, who has died in France aged 95, edited and revised his father J R R Tolkien’s unpublished manuscripts after the author’s death, and was fiercely protective of his literary inheritance.
When JRR Tolkien died in 1973 he left a large archive of unpublished material on all aspects of the mythos of Middle‑earth, the world he had invented and described in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Some of the writings consisted of notes jotted down during Tolkien’s time training as a signals officer, and in hospital with trench fever, during the First World War; some had been written only a few years before his death.
Much of it was handwritten; often an earlier draft would be discernible, half‑erased, under a later one, and names of characters frequently changed between the beginning and end of the same draft. Christopher Tolkien, with the help of Guy Gavriel Kay (later a respected fantasy author in his own right), took on the task of editing this disparate mass of legends with an appropriate degree of trepidation.
Tolkien’s task was far from straightforward; as he described it, his father had “tended to work on a story by starting again at the beginning, so one might find a complete version of a very early date, and then another version in which part of that was rewritten, and then another, layer upon layer. Some parts were so worked over that the styles didn’t match.”
Pressure from readers and publishers to produce a final text, and difficulty accessing some texts, compelled Tolkien to rush through or overlook certain parts of the collection, and he subsequently suggested that had conditions been more favourable he might have produced a substantially different work.
Though he insisted that the vast majority of the completed text was entirely his father’s work, he admitted that at times he had been compelled to guess at what his father’s intentions had been, and on occasions to invent ideas himself.
As a result, the place of the collection in the Middle‑earth canon is hotly debated. Crucially, he edited the material to make it consistent within itself and with reference to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
He later described the size and the importance of the task as he saw it: “When I finished, I felt an enormous relief that I had survived – I had been afraid that, for some reason, I wouldn’t be able to finish it. It had been a great responsibility.” The collection, which explores themes inspired by sources as disparate as the Hebrew Bible, Norse sagas and Greek mythology, and also contained genealogies, maps, an index and the first ever Elvish word list, was published as The Silmarillion in 1977.
It was by no means exhaustive, and Tolkien continued to work incessantly on his father’s archive, publishing Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth in 1980, and the 12‑volume The History of Middle-earth between 1983 and 1996.
Unfinished Tales, unlike
The Silmarillion, contains
JRR Tolkien’s short stories and collections of “factual” information about Middle‑earth relatively unchanged, while the History contains both unpublished material and Tolkien’s own analysis of his father’s works, intended to further develop the mythology behind The Lord of the Rings.
In 2007 Tolkien published The Children of Húrin, a story planned by JRR but never completed. Set centuries before the events of
The Lord of the Rings, it is based on a Finnish folk story from the Kalevala, often called the national epic of Finland and regarded as one of the most significant works of Finnish literature.
Several further volumes followed, the latest (The Fall of Gondolin) in 2018.
Christopher John Reuel Tolkien was born in Leeds, where his father was a professor at the university, on November 21 1924. He was the youngest of three brothers; a sister followed in 1929. From a very early age he was exposed to his father’s literary creations, in the form of letters from Father Christmas, an annual series of missives describing events at the North Pole, and featuring characters including the Snow Elves, the Red Gnomes, and the North Polar Bear, each with appropriate illustrations. The letters were later published as The Father Christmas Letters, edited by Christopher Tolkien’s wife Baillie.
The most mundane events prompted the composition of stories by the family as a whole, including the series, inspired by signs seen on an outing, detailing the efforts of the tireless Major Road Ahead to apprehend (and prosecute) the notorious
Bill Stickers. Tolkien’s eye for detail was apparent even then, as he pointed out the inconsistencies in his father’s stories. His father paid him twopence for each mistake he found in the published text of
The Hobbit.
Tolkien was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford and then at the Oratory School, in Caversham at that time. During the Second World
War he trained in South Africa to become a fighter pilot, and served in the
RAF and the Fleet Air
Arm.
Even during this period he was influential on his father’s work;
JRR sent him frequent letters detailing the progress of The Lord of the Rings and, occasionally, bundles of manuscript for him to comment on.
After that, Tolkien followed his father into academia, studying English at Oxford, where he became Lecturer and Tutor in English Language (specialising, like his father, in Middle English) at New College in 1964, a post he held until 1975, when he left Oxford, and England, to work on his father’s papers in France. Good‑looking and tall, with a pipe clenched in his teeth, the now‑ greying Christopher still made a distinctly donnish impression on his new French neighbours, though warm, affectionate and readily moved to mirth. In the late 1970s he also produced the map of Middle Earth published with the books.
Tolkien’s role as guardian of his father’s creations, however, grew more problematic in the following years. JRR Tolkien’s sale of the film rights in 1969 left the family with no control over the production of any film versions, but Tolkien and his siblings failed to conceal their scepticism over Peter Jackson’s two trilogies of films – The Lord of the Rings (2001‑ 03) and The Hobbit (2012‑14).
Tolkien maintained that the books were “peculiarly unsuitable to transformation into visual dramatic form”. Reports suggested that it was Tolkien’s son Simon’s support for the films which led to their estrangement and the exclusion of Simon by Christopher from the Tolkien Estate.
“I think what my father found really outrageous was the fact that I would cross him,” Simon explained. “He felt that was treachery.” But they were subsequently reconciled.
Perhaps to avoid the publicity generated by the films, Tolkien remained in the south of France for the rest of his life. In their modest houses, first in La Garde‑freinet, then near Aups in the Provençal countryside, the Tolkien family enjoyed their happy domestic lives.
Christopher Tolkien loved good food, wine and interesting restaurants, as did his second wife Baillie, a superb cook, and their two children, Adam and Rachel. Brought up bilingual, they went to local schools; Baillie retained a hint of her native North America in her spoken French. The Tolkiens enjoyed participating in local pursuits and had a rich cultural life, shared chiefly with their neighbours, but also with their extended family and many British visitors.
Tolkien had one son, Simon, by his first wife, Faith (née Faulconbridge); that marriage was dissolved in 1964. In 1967 he married his father’s Canadian former secretary, Baillie (née Klass), who survives him with his three children.
Tolkien was sceptical about the films, thinking the books ‘peculiarly unsuitable’ to be adapted