Editing Christopher Tolkien (section)

== Editorial work ==

=== The challenge of the legendarium ===

{{further|Tolkien's legendarium}}

{{Tolkien's legendarium|upright=2|caption=Navigable diagram of [[Tolkien's legendarium]]. Most of it is in ''The History of Middle-earth'', a 12-volume account of how J. R. R. Tolkien wrote ''The Silmarillion'' and ''The Lord of the Rings''. It combines Christopher's editorial comments with his father's drafts, many of which were handwritten, sometimes partly-erased and often hard to decipher.<ref name="NYT 2020"/>}}
 
Tolkien wrote a great deal of material in the [[Middle-earth legendarium]] that remained unpublished in his lifetime. He had originally intended to publish ''[[The Silmarillion]]'' alongside ''The 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 Christopher organised the masses of his father's unpublished writings, some of them written on odd scraps of paper half a century earlier.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.<ref name="NYT 2020"/> He explained:

{{blockquote|By the time of my father's death the amount of writing in existence on the subject of the [[History of Arda|Three 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 the [[alliterative verse|ancient English alliterative metre]] to severe historical analysis of [[Languages constructed by J. R. R. Tolkien|his own extremely difficult languages]]: a vast repository and labyrinth of story, [[Poetry in The Lord of the Rings|of poetry]], of philosophy, and [[Philology and Middle-earth|of philology]] ... To bring it into publishable form was a task at once utterly absorbing and alarming in its responsibility toward something that is unique.<ref name="McIlwaine 2022 Intro">[[Catherine McIlwaine|McIlwaine, Catherine]]. "Introduction" in {{harvnb|Ovenden|McIlwaine|2022|pp=7–10, 14–22}}</ref>}}

=== From ''The Silmarillion'' to ''The History of Middle-earth'' ===

{{further|The Silmarillion|The History of Middle-earth}}

Christopher and Kay produced a single-volume edition of ''The Silmarillion'' for publication in 1977.<ref name="NYT 2020"/> Its success led to the publication of ''[[Unfinished Tales]]'' in 1980, and then to the far larger project of ''[[The History of Middle-earth]]'' in 12 volumes between 1983 and 1996. Most of the original source-texts that Christopher used to construct ''The Silmarillion'' were published in this way. [[Charles Noad]] comments that the 12-volume ''History'' had done something that a putative single-volume edition of ''[[The Silmarillion]]'' with embedded commentary could not have achieved: it had changed people's perspective on Tolkien's Middle-earth writings, from being centred on ''The Lord of the Rings'' to what it had always been in Tolkien's mind: ''Silmarillion''-centred.<ref name="Noad 1994">{{cite journal |last=Noad |first=Charles |author-link=Charles Noad |title=[Untitled Review of ''[[The War of the Jewels]]''] |journal=[[Mallorn (journal)|Mallorn]] |issue=31 |year=1994 |pages=50–54 |jstor=45320384}}</ref> Noad adds that "The whole series of ''The 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."<ref name="Noad 1996">{{cite journal |last=Noad |first=Charles E. |title=[Untitled Review] |journal=[[Mallorn (journal)|Mallorn]] |issue=34 |year=1996 |pages=33–41 |jstor=45321696}}</ref>

=== "Great Tales" of the "Elder Days" ===

In April 2007, he published ''[[The 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 in ''The Silmarillion'', ''Unfinished Tales'', and ''The History of Middle-earth''. ''The Children of Húrin'' is a synthesis of these and other sources. It, along with ''[[Beren and Lúthien]]'', published in 2017,<ref name="BBC Beren and Lúthien 2017">{{Cite web |url=https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-40109396 |title=JRR Tolkien book Beren and Lúthien published after 100 years |date=1 June 2017 |publisher=[[BBC]] |access-date=5 June 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170605022233/http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-40109396 |archive-date=5 June 2017 |url-status=live }}</ref> and ''[[The Fall of Gondolin]]'', published in 2018,<ref name="TolkienSociety2">{{cite news |url=https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2018/08/the-fall-of-gondolin-published/ |title=The Fall of Gondolin published |date=30 August 2018 |first=Daniel |last=Helen |publisher=[[Tolkien Society]] |access-date=20 January 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191208102521/https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2018/08/the-fall-of-gondolin-published/ |archive-date=8 December 2019 |url-status=live }}</ref> constituted what J. R. R. Tolkien called the three "Great Tales" of the "Elder Days".<ref name="TolkienSociety100418">{{cite web |url=https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2018/04/the-fall-of-gondolin-to-be-published/ |title=The Fall of Gondolin to be published |date=10 April 2018 |first=Daniel |last=Helen |publisher=[[Tolkien Society]] |access-date=20 January 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180704153513/https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2018/04/the-fall-of-gondolin-to-be-published/ |archive-date=4 July 2018 |url-status=live }}</ref>

=== Medieval works ===

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 Norse [[Völsung]] cycle, followed by ''[[The Fall of Arthur]]'' in May 2013,<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/Titles/79908/the-fall-of-arthur-j-r-r-tolkien-9780007489947 |title=The Fall of Arthur – J.R.R. Tolkien |publisher=[[HarperCollins]] |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130511044715/http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/Titles/79908/the-fall-of-arthur-j-r-r-tolkien-9780007489947 |archive-date=11 May 2013 |access-date=23 May 2013 }}</ref> and by ''[[Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary]]'' in May 2014.<ref>{{cite news |last=Flood |first=Alison |title=JRR Tolkien translation of Beowulf to be published after 90-year wait |newspaper=[[The Guardian]] |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/19/jrr-tolkien-beowulf-translation-published |access-date=7 December 2014 |date=19 March 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150119004230/http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/19/jrr-tolkien-beowulf-translation-published |archive-date=19 January 2015 |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |last=Raymond |first=Ken |title=Tolkien's 'Beowulf' battles critics |date=30 May 2014 |website=NewsOk.com |publisher=[[The Oklahoman]] |url=http://newsok.com/tolkiens-beowulf-battles-critics/article/4869349 |access-date=13 December 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150224215234/http://newsok.com/tolkiens-beowulf-battles-critics/article/4869349 |archive-date=24 February 2015 |url-status=live }}</ref>