In Memoriam

Christopher Tolkien Was The Unsung Hero Of Middle Earth

The son of J.R.R. Tolkien did far more than just compile and edit his father’s unfinished stories. He helped create the world of Middle Earth.

John Daniel Davidson
The Federalist

Last week, amid churning news cycles about impeachment and Iran and global trade deals, an era quietly ended. Christopher Tolkien, the third and youngest son of “Lord of the Rings” author J.R.R. Tolkien, died at the age of 95.

The younger Tolkien, who spent the last four decades of his life completing his father’s grand artistic vision, was one of the great unsung literary heroes of the last century. For countless readers whose imaginations were molded in part by the legendarium of Middle Earth, his passing severs the last living link to another existential plane.

His obituaries variously describe Tolkien as the editor of his father’s posthumous works, or the guardian of his legacy. But that is not quite right—or not quite enough. Christopher Tolkien was more than an editor or a guardian; he was a kind of co-creator with his father of Middle Earth itself.

It was Christopher Tolkien who, in 1975 at age 50, left his fellowship at Oxford University to sort through dozens of boxes of his late father’s unfinished writings, some dating back more than 60 years and most of which dealt with the creation and history of Middle Earth and its peoples—the entire literary universe in which “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” take place.

He spent years compiling and editing these fragments and notes, and in 1977, more than two decades after the publication of his father’s acclaimed trilogy, “The Silmarillion” was published. It went on to sell millions of copies in dozens of editions and translations, and served as the foundation for two-dozen subsequent works derived from Tolkien’s archives, culminating with the publication, last August, of “The Fall of Gondolin”—Christopher Tolkien’s final literary contribution to a creative project that now spans more than a century.

From the very beginning, Tolkien had a hand in crafting what would become one of the greatest literary achievements of modern times.