Christopher Tolkien has died aged 95

[Alcuin]

Christopher John Reuel Tolkien, youngest son and fourth child of author JRR Tolkien, died Wednesday 15 January 2020 at his home in southeastern France.

Christopher Tolkien was his father’s sounding board for his stories. He recalled that he was four when his father began telling a story about a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins. He reproached his father complaining,

“‘Last time, you said Bilbo’s front door was blue, and you said Thorin had a gold tassel on his hood, but you’ve just said that Bilbo’s front door was green, and the tassel on Thorin’s hood was silver’; at which point my father muttered ‘Damn the boy,’ and then strode across the room to his desk to make a note.”

And so arose the tale of The Hobbit. Later when Christopher Tolkien served in the Royal Air Force in South Africa, his father wrote him frequently and sent him excerpts from The Lord of the Rings for his pleasure and to garner his opinions on them. After the war, Christopher Tolkien drew the famous large-scale map of Middle-earth that is printed in The Lord of the Rings: the original with his father’s annotations is in the British Library; Christopher Tolkien signed the map “CJRT”.

An outstanding linguist and scholar in his own right, CJRT published two translations of Norse sagas and commentaries on three sections of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. When his father died, he became executor of his estate. He devoted the rest of his life to his father’s literary work, beginning with The Silmarillion, which JRR Tolkien was unable to publish during his lifetime. Altogether he published twenty-six volumes of his father’s material, painstakingly teasing information from disparate repositories at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. His last publications included the three Great Tales of the First Age, The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien, and The Fall of Gondolin, as well as his father’s telling of The Fall of Arthur and Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary. His father was recognized in his lifetime as the world’s leading expert on Beowulf. The Fall of Gondolin was published less than seventeen months before Christopher Tolkien died.

According to his brother-in-law,

[Christopher] Tolkien [was] extraordinarily disciplined. He ... would lock himself in his office early in the morning and not emerge until lunchtime.

“His life’s work was to convert this huge mass of material written on envelopes and napkins in his father’s unreadable handwriting.”

Here are links to some obituaries:

• The London Telegraph
• Christian Headlines
• The Tolkien Society

[Valandil]

Any departure is sad - and he certainly did live to a good, old age. I'm so appreciative of what he did. His devotion to searching through his father's writings (scribblings?) and putting together all the parts he did for our enjoyment!

It's been interesting, the last few days, to see snippets (like the above) about his early relations with his father, in regard to all these wonderful stories.

I know that he had already stepped out of his position with Tolkien Estates... but I wonder if things were still run as he would have wished for as long as he was alive. And I wonder how the Estate will handle all the JRRT intellectual property now.

[Earniel]

It's a loss, alright. He did wonders at making his father's work accessible and open for study. And it has been a mammoth task at times! Not many would even have endeavoured to begin such a job.

We'd have a lot less of Middle-earth without Christopher Tolkien's hard work.