Christopher Tolkien obit

JRR Tolkien's son Christopher dies aged 95

Youngest son of Lord of the Rings author was responsible for editing and publishing much of his father’s work

He was not on the list.



Christopher Tolkien, the son of Lord Of The Rings author JRR Tolkien, has died aged 95, the Tolkien Society has announced. The society, which promotes the life and works of the celebrated writer, released a short statement on Twitter to confirm the news.

The statement said: “Christopher Tolkien has died at the age of 95. The Tolkien Society sends its deepest condolences to Baillie, Simon, Adam, Rachel and the whole Tolkien family.”

Tolkien, who was born in Leeds in 1924, was the third and youngest son of the revered fantasy author and his wife Edith. He grew up listening to his father’s tales of Bilbo Baggins, which later became the children’s fantasy novel, The Hobbit.

He drew many of the original maps detailing the world of Middle-earth for his father’s The Lord of the Rings when the series was first published between 1954 and 55. He also edited much of his father’s posthumously published work following his death in 1973. Since 1975 he had lived in France with Baillie.

Tolkien Society chairman Shaun Gunner praised Christopher’s commitment to his father’s work and said: “Millions of people around the world will be forever grateful to him … We have lost a titan and he will be sorely missed.”

Charlie Redmayne, chief executive of HarperCollins UK, which publishes much of JRR Tolkien’s work, said: “Christopher was a devoted curator of his father’s work and the timeless and ongoing popularity of the world that JRR Tolkien created is a fitting testimony to the decades he spent bringing Middle-Earth to generations of readers.


“[He was] the most charming of men, and a true gentleman. It was an honour and privilege to know and work with him and our thoughts are with his family at this time.”

Tolkien scholar Dimitra Fimi hailed Christopher for enriching his father’s work. She said: “He gave us a window into Tolkien’s creative process, and he provided scholarly commentary that enriched our understanding of Middle-earth. He was Middle-earth’s cartographer and first scholar.”

In an interview with the Guardian in 2012, Christopher’s son Simon described the enormity of the task after his grandfather died with so much material still unpublished.

Simon said: “He had produced this huge output that covered everything from the history of the gods to the history of the people he called the Silmarils – that was his great work, but it had never seen the light of day despite his best efforts to get it published.”

His son was left to sift through the files and notebooks, and over the two decades after his father’s death, he published The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, Beren And Lúthien and The History of Middle-earth, which fleshed out the complex world of elves and dwarves created by his father.

“It’s enormously to my father’s credit that he took on that huge task. I remember the crateloads of papers arriving at his home, and no one could be in any doubt at the scale of the work he had taken on,” Simon said.

Although he worked tirelessly to protect his father’s legacy, he was not impressed by what he saw as the commercialisation of his work. He was famously critical of Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. In a 2012 interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, he said: “They gutted the book, making an action film for 15-to-25-year-olds.”

He also said: “Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed by the absurdity of our time,” and that “the commercialisation has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing”.