Christopher Tolkien | |
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 Tolkien in 2019 | |
| Born | Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (1924-11-21)21 November 1924 Leeds, England |
| Died | 16 January 2020(2020-01-16) (aged 95) Draguignan, France |
| Occupation |
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| Alma mater | Trinity College, Oxford (BA,BLitt) |
| Genre | Fantasy |
| Notable awards | Bodley Medal (2016) |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 3, includingSimon andAdam |
| Parents |
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| Relatives |
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Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (21 November 1924 – 16 January 2020) was an English and naturalised French academic editor and writer. The son of the author and academicJ. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher edited 24 volumes based on his father'sposthumously published work, includingThe Silmarillion and the 12-volume seriesThe History of Middle-Earth, a task that took 45 years. He also drew the originalmaps for his father's fantasy novelThe Lord of the Rings.
Outside his father's unfinished works, Christopher edited three tales byGeoffrey Chaucer (withNevill Coghill) and his father's translation ofSir Gawain and the Green Knight. Tolkien scholars have remarked that he used his skill as aphilologist, demonstrated in his editing of those medieval works, to research, collate, edit, and comment on his father's Middle-earth writings exactly as if they were real-world legends. The effect is both to frame his father's works and to insert himself as a narrator. They have further noted that his additions toThe Silmarillion, such as to fill in gaps, and his composition of the text in his own literary style, place him as an author as well as an editor of that book.
Christopher Tolkien was born on 21 November 1924 inLeeds, England,[1][2] the third of four children and the youngest son ofJ. R. R. andEdith Tolkien (née Bratt).[3] He was educated at theDragon School inOxford, and later at the Roman CatholicOratory School nearReading.[4]
He won a place to study English atTrinity College, Oxford, still aged 17, but after a year and a half there he received his call-up papers for military service. He joined theRoyal Air Force in July 1943 and at the start of 1944 was sent to South Africa for flight training. He gained his "wings" as a fighter pilot and wascommissioned in January 1945. He was given a posting back in England in February 1945, atMarket Drayton in Shropshire. In June 1945 he switched to theFleet Air Arm. While still in the service, he resumed his degree in April 1946; he was demobilised at the end of that year. He took his B.A. in 1948, and hisB.Litt. in 1953 under the philologistGabriel Turville-Petre.[5]
Tolkien was for a long time part of the critical audience for his father's fiction, first as a child listening to tales ofBilbo Baggins (published asThe Hobbit), and then as a teenager and young adult offering feedback onThe Lord of the Rings throughout its 15-year gestation.[5] He also redrew his father's working maps for inclusion inThe Lord of the Rings.[6] His father invited him to jointhe Inklings, a literary discussion group, when Christopher was 21 years old. His father called this "a quite unprecedented honour".[5] He became a lecturer in English language atSt Catherine's Society, Oxford in 1954.[5]
Away from his father's writings, he publishedThe Saga of King Heidrek the Wise: "Translated from theIcelandic with Introduction, Notes and Appendices by Christopher Tolkien" in 1960.[7] Later, he followed in his father's footsteps, becoming a lecturer and tutor in English language atNew College, Oxford in 1963.[5][8]
In 1967 his father named him as his literary executor, and more specifically as his co-author ofThe Silmarillion. After his father's death in 1973, he took a large quantity oflegendarium manuscripts to his Oxfordshire home, where he converted a barn into a workspace. He and the youngGuy Gavriel Kay started work on the documents, discovering by 1975 how complex the task was likely to be. In September 1975 he resigned from New College to work exclusively on editing his father's writings. He moved to France and continued this task for 45 years.[5] In all, he edited and published 24 volumes of his father's writings, most of them to do with the Middle-earth legendarium.[9]
In 2016 Christopher won aBodley Medal, an award that recognises outstanding contributions to literature, culture, science, and communication.[10]
He served as chairman of theTolkien Estate, the entity formed to handle the business side of his father's literary legacy, and as a trustee of the Tolkien Charitable Trust. He resigned as director of the estate in 2017.[11]
Tolkien wrote a great deal of material in theMiddle-earth legendarium that remained unpublished in his lifetime. He had originally intended to publishThe Silmarillion alongsideThe Lord of the Rings in the 1950s, but it was rejected by his publisher. Parts of it were in a finished state when he died in 1973, but the project was incomplete. He once called his son his "chief critic and collaborator", and named him his literary executor. Christopher organised the masses of his father's unpublished writings, some of them written on odd scraps of paper half a century earlier. Much of the material was handwritten; frequently a fair draft was written over a half-erased first draft, and names of characters routinely changed between the beginning and the end of the same draft.[12] He explained:
By the time of my father's death the amount of writing in existence on the subject of theThree Ages was huge in quantity (since it extended over a lifetime), disordered, more full of beginnings than of ends, and varying in content from heroic verse in theancient English alliterative metre to severe historical analysis ofhis own extremely difficult languages: a vast repository and labyrinth of story,of poetry, of philosophy, andof philology ... To bring it into publishable form was a task at once utterly absorbing and alarming in its responsibility toward something that is unique.[5]
Christopher and Kay produced a single-volume edition ofThe Silmarillion for publication in 1977.[12] Its success led to the publication ofUnfinished Tales in 1980, and then to the far larger project ofThe History of Middle-earth in 12 volumes between 1983 and 1996. Most of the original source-texts that Christopher used to constructThe Silmarillion were published in this way.Charles Noad comments that the 12-volumeHistory had done something that a putative single-volume edition ofThe Silmarillion with embedded commentary could not have achieved: it had changed people's perspective on Tolkien's Middle-earth writings, from being centred onThe Lord of the Rings to what it had always been in Tolkien's mind:Silmarillion-centred.[13] Noad adds that "The whole series ofThe History of Middle-earth is a tremendous achievement and makes a worthy and enduring testament to one man's creative endeavours and to another's explicatory devotion. It reveals far more about Tolkien's invented world than any of his readers in pre-Silmarillion days could ever have imagined or hoped for."[14]
In April 2007, he publishedThe Children of Húrin, whose story his father had brought to a relatively complete stage between 1951 and 1957, but then abandoned. This was one of his father's earliest stories, its first version dating back to 1918; several versions are published inThe Silmarillion,Unfinished Tales, andThe History of Middle-earth.The Children of Húrin is a synthesis of these and other sources. It, along withBeren and Lúthien, published in 2017,[15] andThe Fall of Gondolin, published in 2018,[16] constituted what J. R. R. Tolkien called the three "Great Tales" of the "Elder Days".[17]
Christopher edited some works by his father that were unconnected to the Middle-earth legendarium.The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún appeared in May 2009, a verse retelling of the NorseVölsung cycle, followed byThe Fall of Arthur in May 2013,[18] and byBeowulf: A Translation and Commentary in May 2014.[19][20]
Vincent Ferré comments that early in the process of editing his father's unpublished writings, "the real nature of Christopher Tolkien's work was a matter of debate, before a more simplistic consensus began to prevail."[21] Christopher Tolkien explained inThe Silmarillion's foreword in 1977 "I set myself therefore 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."[21] In Ferré's opinion, "This choice remains one of his [most] distinctive marks on the book", noting that J. R. R. Tolkien had foreseen in a 1963 letter that the presentation of the stories "will need a lot of work ... the legends have to be worked over ... and made consistent ... and they have to be given some progressive shape."[21][22]
In 1981, the scholar of literatureRandel Helms, taking that statement as definitive of Christopher Tolkien's editorial, indeed authorial, intentions:[21] stated in terms that "The Silmarillion in the shape that we have it [a single-volume narrative] is the invention of the son not the father".[23]
Christopher Tolkien disagreed, stating in the foreword to the 1983The Book of Lost Tales, that the outcome of his work had been "to add a further dimension of obscurity toThe Silmarillion, ... about the age of the work ... and about the degree of editorial intrusion and manipulation (or even invention), is a stumbling-block and a source of much misapprehension."[24] In the same foreword, while rebuffing Helms but without explaining why Helms's opinion was wrong,[21] Christopher Tolkien admitted that the wisdom of publishingThe Silmarillion with (unlikeThe Lord of the Rings) noframe 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."[24] He noted, too, that thephilologist and Tolkien scholarTom Shippey, in his bookThe Road to Middle-earth, was "clearly reluctant to see [The Silmarillion] as other than a 'late' work, even the latest work of its author", i.e. that its text owes as much to Christopher Tolkien as to his father.[24][a]
Ferré records that, much later, in 2012, Christopher Tolkien admitted "I had had to invent some passages",[26] that he had had a dream that his father was anxiously searching for something, and that he had "realized in horror that it wasThe Silmarillion."[26] In Ferré's view, he should be thought of as "a writer in his own right, and not only as an 'editor' of his father's manuscripts". He gives two reasons for this: thatThe Silmarillion reveals his own writing style and "the choices he made in 'constructing'" the narrative; and that he had to devise parts of the story, both to fill gaps and when "threads were impossible to weave together".[21]
Christopher Tolkien's editing of the 12 volumes ofThe History of Middle-earth, using his skill as a philologist, created an editorial frame for his father's legendarium, and for the books derived from it. Ferré comments that this presented his father's writings as historical, a real set of legends from the past, in just the same way that his editing ofThe Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays presented his father's essays as scholarly work.[21]
![Editorial framing of The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays by Christopher Tolkien presents it as a set of scholarly texts.[21]](/mt/?noimg=&dark=on&url=https%3a%2f%2fwikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fFile%3aEditorial_framing_of_The_Monsters_and_The_Critics.svg)
![Christopher Tolkien's editorial framing of the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth presents his father's legendarium, and the books derived from it, as a set of historic texts, analogous to the presentation of genuine scholarly works like The Monsters and The Critics; and it creates a narrative voice throughout the series, a figure of Christopher Tolkien himself.[21]](/mt/?noimg=&dark=on&url=https%3a%2f%2fwikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fFile%3aEditorial_framing_of_The_History_of_Middle-earth.svg)
In 2001 Christopher Tolkien expressed doubts overThe Lord of the Rings film trilogy directed byPeter Jackson, questioning theviability of a film interpretation that retained the essence of the work, but stressed that this was just his opinion.[27] In a 2012 interview withLe Monde, he criticised the films, saying: "They gutted the book, making anaction film for 15 to 25-year-olds."[28] In 2008 he commenced legal proceedings againstNew Line Cinema, which he claimed owed his family £80 million in unpaid royalties.[29] In September 2009, he and New Line reached an undisclosed settlement, and he withdrew his legal objection toThe Hobbit films.[30]
Tolkien was married twice. He had two sons and one daughter. His first marriage in 1951 was to the sculptor Faith Lucy Tilly Faulconbridge (1928–2017). They separated in 1964, and divorced in 1967.[31][32] Her work is featured in theNational Portrait Gallery.[33] Their sonSimon Mario Reuel Tolkien is abarrister and novelist.[31]
He marriedBaillie Klass in 1967; they had two children, Adam and Rachel. In 1975 they moved to the south of France,[34] where she edited her father-in-law'sThe Father Christmas Letters for posthumous publication.[35][36]
In the wake of a dispute surrounding the making ofThe Lord of the Rings film trilogy, he is said to have disapproved of the views of his son Simon.[37][38] He felt thatThe Lord of the Rings was "peculiarly unsuitable for transformation into visual dramatic form", whilst his son became involved as an advisor with the series. They later reconciled, and Simon dedicated one of his novels to his father.[39][40]
Tolkien died on 16 January 2020, at the age of 95, inDraguignan,Var, France.[12][41][1][3]
