Editing Christopher Tolkien (section)

=== 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>