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Christopher Tolkien
Jan. 19th, 2020 07:46 pmI first read The Lord of the Rings in 1970, and it had an immense impact on me: aside from its own considerable heft, the context of the day directed me into fantasy when that meant Morris, Cabell, and Dunsany, and not the EFP of the later 1970s. As Christopher was the original audience for the Hobbit (and much of LOTR) without whom his father might never have written what he did as he did, that is the first debt I owe him.
I waited seven years before The Silmarillion came out. I was in Grade 13 at the time. The sheer density of the book was a delight; and, of course, it provided the backstory I had been hoping for for years. That was the second debt I owe him (along with Guy Kay).
Somewhere around the middle of my undergraduate years Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth came out, the harbinger of the extended History of Middle-Earth to follow over the next quarter-century. Like the (much later) editions of The Tale of Beren and Lúthien and The Fall of Gondolin, that first book was essentially a "flat" presentation of stories and background information within the secondary world; the HoME series provided a diachronic presentation of the development of the text(s) from early inception down to 1973.
Tolkien père was an accretive author; his work developed substantially and incrementally draft by draft, both in detail and in large structure. In this he resembles Joyce but not, say, Heminge and Condell's Shakespeare, who "never blotted a line'[1], or Dickens, Trollope and Collins, who wrote for serialized publication and did any polishing they could up front. The evidence of the HoME volumes sheds a fascinating light on the process of composition lying behind a polished final product. So that's a third debt owed to Tolkien fils.
There were the non-Middle-Earth books: some were edited by others, but Christopher edited the works closest to his father's interests: The Fall of Arthur, Beowulf, Sigurd and Gudrun. These are mainly of interest to those who share both Tolkiens' interest - Christopher was a mediaevalist before taking in his father's estate - in "the northern thing" in form and content. A lesser debt, perhaps, but still real.
Finally, Christopher's management of the Tolkien estate ensured that there was little over-the-top exploitation of the IP (at least until the movies came along under rights sold back in the 1950s). Though this had its downsides as well as its upsides - it suppressed the possibility of serious derivative works as well as crass commercialism - my sense is that, on balance, it was a better thing than not (having seen the "new" Winnie-the-Pooh and Narnia books which have come out in the last few years).
Euge serve bone, et fidelis: quia super pauca fuisti fidelis, super multa te constituam; intra in gaudium Domini tui.
[1]To which Ben Jonson rejoined "would he had blotted a thousand". In fact, the evidence of plays like Lear and Hamlet, and variant passages in some other plays, suggest that he was in fact a significant reviser at least some of the time.
