Christopher Tolkien, the son of J.R.R. Tolkien who continued his father’s publishing legacy, has died, according to The Tolkien Society. He was 95.
The third son of the late epic fantasy author, Christopher was the initial audience for his father’s initial famous work, The Hobbit. While the elder Tolkien rose to international fame with his Lord of the Rings trilogy, he was also responsible for creating the massive world and backstory in which the novels were set. Following the death of his father in 1973, Christopher Tolkien was placed in charge of his massive literary estate, and began to organize his papers.
In 1977, he collected and published The Silmarillion, a work that Tolkien had intended to publish, which explored the origins of Middle-earth and set up the conflict that he explored in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
In the years that followed, he continued to produce new volumes of Tolkien’s unpublished writings, releasing Unfinished Tales in 1980, the 12-volume History of Middle-earth between 1982 and 1996, and edited and completed a number of longer narratives and translations of epic poems, including The Children of Húrin (2007), The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (2009), The Fall of Arthur (2013), Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, (2014), Beren and Lúthien (2017), and The Fall of Gondolin (2018).
In 2017, Tolkien stepped down as the director of the Tolkien Estate and Tolkien Trust, saying at the time that Beren and Lúthien would likely be his final book. Tolkien was a staunch critic of Peter Jackson’s adaptation of his father’s trilogy, telling Le Monde in 2012 that “They gutted the book, making it an action movie for 15-25 year-olds, and it looks like The Hobbit will be the same.” His death comes at a time when his father’s books are more popular than ever, and as Amazon works to create a massive TV series based on the works that he himself helped bring to the public.
While Tolkien was the author behind the world of Middle-earth, Christopher Tolkien was the one responsible for ensuring that his father’s stories remained in the public view by continuing to publish develop the backstory of the world that has influenced and inspired fans around the world.
Until at last on a night of rain [Christopher] smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing as it came over the water. And . . . the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.
R.I.P. and thank you for continuing to share your family’s legacy with us.
I loved The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings, as so many of us did, but it was the depth of world-building that appeared in The Silmarillion and the subsequent History of Middle-Earth series that submerged me in Tolkien’s world.
JRRT may have been the originator but Christopher Tolkien did phenomenal work bringing the sheer depth and complexity of his father’s work to the public.
Ninety-five years is, as they say, a very good innings!
In terms of effect on cultural production, I think Silmarillion is the most influential book of the last fifty years. It created and popularized the prequel, a way to exploit intellectual property, without which half of current genre literature and movies would not exist.
RIP Christopher.
Thank you for keeping your father’s works alive and publishing them for newer generations!
@1 If I wasn’t crying before, I am now.
Sad. reading the silmarillion and the history of middle-earth as a kid, helped me with world and lore building for my own D20 game I ran with friends
Thank you!
RIP M. Tolkien. I have nothing but respect and admiration for your hard work these past decades.
In the last few years I’ve elevated Christopher in my pantheon of important literary figures to a spot right next to that of his father. His contributions to the Professor’s work have been immense to say the least. Anybody that has read even a single volume of The History of Middle-earth understands this.
To most, I think, the mountains of paper left to the Tolkien estate after the passing of J.R.R. Tolkien would have be considered little more than a pile of scattered notes. C. Tolkien knew it contained riches and has been masterfully bringing them to light for decades. For all his work, I offer my thanks.
@@.-@: The Silmarillion was almost entirely plotted out, outlined and partly written before work on The Lord of the Rings began (in fact, the first draft was completed in the mid-1920s before work even began on The Hobbit), so although ultimately published as a prequel it was not written as one.
The Silmarillion‘s status is more down to its titanic, vivid storytelling and epic imagery rather than its status as a prequel, which was not particularly unusual at the time. Several of the Narnia books were written and published as prequels in the 1940s.
This Tolkien fan is very grateful for Christopher’s Herculean work in getting all his father’s unpublished work published for all of us to enjoy.
Thank you and RIP
Namárië.
The end of an era! So very sad. I join with others who are mourning Christopher Tolkien’s passing and thank him for his great contribution to literary fantasy and human imagination.
RIP, Mr Tolkien.
I have the greatest respect for what he did with and for JRRT’s papers. It would have been so easy to just leave them alone to gather dust but he took the massive job on. I cannot imagine how hard it was for Christopher to literally pick up a piece of paper and remember his father writing at his desk. Every. Piece. of. Paper.
Thats Love.
Thank you, Mr. Tolkien.
Aw, sad. I’m really grateful for the work, attention and love he put into making his father’s work available, and all the interesting worldbuilding details it involved. He was protective of the legacy and perhaps rightfully/understandably so – although it will be interesting to see going forward how the Estate handles such things. I still haven’t read the Beren and Luthien book.
Christopher Tolkien also drew the map of Middle-earth that appeared in the first edition of The Lord of the Rings. That map was hugely influential on the fantasy genre. It helped set the norm for subsequent epic fantasy novels: they would come with maps, and those maps would look rather a lot like the one drawn by Christopher Tolkien.
The amount of material Christopher Tolkien produced out of his father’s writing can only make us wonder how many rich worlds die with an author when they don’t have such a devoted child to pick up the torch. We’re lucky Christopher believed in his father’s work enough that we now so much about the world JRR created.
Matthew 25:21 “His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’
Christopher Tolkien took on a near impossible task and executed it with exceptional skill: I hope the estate will choose a successor of comparable competence. He will be missed.
“They gutted the book, making it an action movie for 15-25 year-olds, and it looks like The Hobbit will be the same.”
My take on the movies was that, to quote a professor of note, they ‘looked fair and felt foul’. Jackson lost me when Frodo had the panic attack at the Prancing Pony, and didn’t get me back. I believe he really wanted to do a big budget remake of Hawk the Slayer, but knew that no studio would ever greenlight it.
I have to comment young Mr Tolkien for being a faithful curator of his father’s work, and for putting a mind-boggling body of work into some semblance of order, while maintaining the contradictions inherent in the evolving stories. He, almost as much as his father, was crucial to the ‘worldbuilding’ which inspired so many others. I look at the mess in which the Gygax estate (the other monster fantasy IP) is mired and my admiration for Christopher Tolkien’s steady hand is all the greater.
I’m not a completist, so I wasn’t compelled to buy all of the ‘Unfinished Tales’ and ‘Histories’, but after reading The Silmarillion, I had the reading skills to tackle the Norse Eddas and the Finnish Kalevala, which is what I think the Good Professor intended us to do.
I am very grateful to Mr. Christopher Tolkien for his long years of hard work bringing his father’s amazing work to the public. I like to think that he has been welcomed by his father who, after thanking his son for all his care and toil, has invited him to see what he has been working since he left Middle Earth.
Yes, Christopher Tolkien should be commended for his work on his father’s writings! I’ll also remember him as the RAF pilot, meticulous Middle Earth cartographer, and much-beloved son from his father’s letters.
A highlight on a visit to the Bird and Baby was seeing his signature, along with his father’s, among other Inklings’ autographs on paper framed and put up in the main room (I think it was the main room, anyway :)).
R.I.P.
Rest in peace, great sir. Your contributions to making your father’s work a legacy and by extension to the entire fantasy genre cannot be overstated. Thank you, for all of it.
Farewell Mr. Tolkien. You brought forth all the work your father penned so we could better understand his writing and his world. We owe you for so much, the published Silmarillion, the History of Middle Earth, and innumerable materials left unpublished. Although we must bid farewell we will not despair. May you join your father beyond the Circles of the World. Namárië!
End of an era. I hope someone takes up the torch and does it as well as Christopher did. Rest in peace.
Without whom my life would have been much the poorer.
RIP Christopher Tolkien, and thanks for “The Silmarillion”.
It created and popularized the prequel, a way to exploit intellectual property, without which half of current genre literature and movies would not exist.
The prequel had been around for a bit before that!
Henry V is a prequel, as are almost all the other history plays (Shakespeare wrote the Henry VI plays first, then backfilled).
Baruch Dayan Emet.
May his memory be a blessing.
While we’re on the far green country and the swift sunrise, have you all seen this? Bring Kleenex. https://youtu.be/whEpv9d_awU
I’m saddened to hear that Mr. Tolkien has passed away. Without him, so much of his father’s work would remain unknown. I’ve been listening to audio versions of the Silmarillion, the Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings for the last several weeks. With that said, I think the author should rethink the title of this article, architect is not the correct term. An architect’s work is done before the house is built, not after.
Safe journey into the West, my friend. I will not say do not weep, for not all tears are evil.
sad news![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
The Tolkien estate has lost its greatest friend and defender.
Professor Tolkien created Middle-Earth; Mister Tolkien helped to define, enrich & share that dear, familiar place for longer than most of us have been alive – that World and our understanding of it would have been immensely poorer without him. He was as noble a Steward as any the White City of Gondor ever knew and better than most of them.
I would like to extend my condolences to his family and my Respects to the man himself; may he Rest in Peace and may some part of him live on while the Life of Arda endures!
A fond memory of childhood is going to a library with a friend in December, during the holidays, and getting a copy of The Silmarillion with my savings. Then reading it nonstop in the afternoon. Many, many moons ago.
Thank you, Christopher. All those tales will remain alive far longer than any of us. Namárië, mellon!
“But Finrod walks with his father under the trees in Valinor”
A monument of treasures the Tolkien’s and Lewis left shall forever stand while this earth remains. For they have faithfully kept true the work set apart for them. And as a christian mourning Christopher’s death should be short for in his passing he has stepped over to the other side where glory is eternal and laughter doest not to cease.
@39 – your sometimes irreverent comments always make me laugh, but this one really hit me in the feels in the best way :)
@41,
a) You are extremely kind
b) I admit I saw this elsewhere and it hit me the same way; sharing seemed appropriate