Christopher Tolkien

Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (21 November 1924 – 16 January 2020) was an English and French academic editor. He was the son of author J. R. R. Tolkien and the editor of much of his father's published work. Tolkien drew the original maps for his father's The Lord of the Rings.

Early life
Tolkien was born in, England, the third of four children and youngest son of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and his wife, (née Bratt). He was educated at the  and later at.

He entered the in mid-1943 and was sent to South Africa for flight training, completing the elementary flying course at 7 Air School,, and the service flying course at 25 Air School,. He was into the general duties branch of the  on 27 January 1945 as a  on probation (emergency) and was given the  193121. He briefly served as an RAF pilot before transferring to the on 28 June 1945. His commission was confirmed and it was announced he was promoted to  on 27 July 1945.

After the war, he studied at, taking his B.A. in 1949 and his. a few years later.

Career
Tolkien had long been part of the critical audience for his father’s fiction, first as a child listening to tales of Bilbo Baggins (which were published as The Hobbit), and then as a teenager and young adult offering much feedback on The Lord of the Rings during its 15-year gestation. He had the task of interpreting his father’s sometimes self-contradictory maps of Middle-earth in order to produce the versions used in the books, and he re-drew the main map in the late 1970s to clarify the lettering and correct some errors and omissions. Tolkien was invited by his father to join the when he was 21 years old, making him the youngest member of the informal literary discussion society that included, , , , , and.

He published : "Translated from the with Introduction, Notes and Appendices by Christopher Tolkien" in 1960. Later, Tolkien followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a and  in English Language at, from 1964 to 1975.

In 2016, he was given the, an award that recognises outstanding contributions to literature, culture, science, and communication.

Editorial work
His father wrote a great deal of material connected to the Middle-earth legendarium that was not published in his lifetime. J. R. R. Tolkien had originally intended to publish The Silmarillion along with The Lord of the Rings, and parts of it were in a finished state when he died in 1973, but the project was incomplete. Tolkien once referred to his son as his “chief critic and collaborator”, and named him his literary executor in his will. The younger Tolkien organised the masses of his father’s unpublished writings, some of them written on odd scraps of paper a half-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 end of the same draft. In the years following, Tolkien worked on the manuscripts and was able to produce—with assistance from writer —an edition of The Silmarillion for publication in 1977.

The Silmarillion was followed by Unfinished Tales in 1980, and The History of Middle-earth in 12 volumes between 1983 and 1996. Most of the original source-texts have been made public from which The Silmarillion was constructed. In April 2007, Tolkien published The Children of Húrin, whose story his father had brought to a relatively complete stage between 1951 and 1957 before abandoning it. This was one of his father's earliest stories, its first version dating back to 1918; several versions are published in The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle-earth. The Children of Húrin is a synthesis of these and other sources. Beren and Lúthien  is an editorial work and was published as a stand-alone book in 2017.

The next year, The Fall of Gondolin  was published, also as an editorial work. The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien, and The Fall of Gondolin make up the three "Great Tales" of the Elder Days which J. R. R. Tolkien considered to be the biggest stories of the First Age.

published other J. R. R. Tolkien work edited by Tolkien that is not connected to the Middle-earth legendarium. The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún appeared in May 2009, a verse retelling of the Norse cycle, followed by The Fall of Arthur in May 2013, and by Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary in May 2014.

Tolkien served as chairman of the Tolkien Estate, Ltd., 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.

Reaction to filmed versions
In 2001, he expressed doubts over The Lord of the Rings film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, questioning the viability of a film interpretation that retained the essence of the work, but stressed that this was just his opinion. In a 2012 interview with  he criticised the films saying: “They gutted the book, making an for 15 to 25-year-olds.”

In 2008, Tolkien commenced legal proceedings against, which he claimed owed his family 80 million in unpaid royalties. In September 2009, he and New Line reached an undisclosed settlement, and he withdrew his legal objection to The Hobbit films.

Personal life
Tolkien lived from 1975 in the French countryside with his second wife, (née Klass), who edited his father’s The Father Christmas Letters for posthumous publication. They had two children, Adam Reuel Tolkien and Rachel Clare Reuel Tolkien. In the wake of a dispute surrounding the making of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, he his son by his first marriage,  and novelist, though they reconciled before Christopher’s death.

He died on 16 January 2020, at the age of 95, in, , France.