Editing Christopher Tolkien (section)

=== 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Tolkien wrote a great deal of material in the [[Middle-earth legendarium]] that remained unpublished in his lifetime.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 Christopher organised the masses of his father's unpublished writings, some of them written on odd scraps of paper half a century earlier.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>}}