Christopher Tolkien

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Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (born November 21, 1924 in Leeds , Yorkshire , † January 16, 2020 in Draguignan , Provence ) was a British Anglic and Scandinavian Medievalist . He became known to a wider audience as the literary administrator of his father, the British linguist and writer JRR Tolkien . He worked on his father's classic The Lord of the Rings and after his death was the editor of other works on Tolkien's world .

Life

Christopher Tolkien grew up in Oxford as the third of four children of the university professor JRR Tolkien and his wife Edith Tolkien . In the Second World War he served in the Royal Air Force and was stationed in South Africa, among other places. After the war he studied at Trinity College , Oxford. In 1960 he published his translation of the Hervarar saga . From 1964 to 1975 he was a lecturer at Oxford University in older English and Scandinavian languages ​​and literature.

Christopher Tolkien was familiar with his father 's Middle - earth mythology as a child . Part of the literary movement of the Inklings since the late 1930s , Christopher Tolkien played a key role in his father's creation as the constant advisor and draftsman of the accompanying maps while he was writing the Lord of the Rings . To this day, the maps of Middle-earth, which are often included in the books of JRR Tolkien, are based on the drawings by Christopher Tolkien, which he created according to his father's instructions.

After his father's death in 1973, it fell to Christopher Tolkien to prepare the enormous amount of material from the unfinished Silmarillion (some of the notes on scraps of scrap paper were half a century old) for publication. He was excellently suited for this task both through his unique insight into his father's creative processes and through his work as a professor of English at Oxford University. In 1977 his company was finally crowned with success , not least with the help of the author Guy Gavriel Kay . The News from Middle-earth followed three years later , a collection of unfinished stories that complement the Silmarillion material.

Between 1983 and 1996 he published the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth , in which all relevant source materials on the Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings are collected. Without him, these records, which provide information about the development of the various textual stages of both works, would have been withheld from the public interested in Tolkien. Only the first two volumes, the Book of Lost Stories , have been published in German.

In April 2007, Christopher Tolkien published The Children of Húrin , another work from his father's sources. The book was published with an initial worldwide print run of 500,000 copies. His most recent publications, also compiled from his father's sources, include Beren and Lúthien (2017) and The Fall of Gondolin (2018).

In July 2012, Christopher Tolkien appeared in the media for the first time in forty years. In an interview with the French daily Le Monde , in addition to his life's work, the commercialization of Tolkien's world came up , which he faced with incomprehension and which he also included the filming of The Lord of the Rings by the New Zealand film director Peter Jackson :

“Ils ont éviscéré le livre, en en faisant un film d'action pour les 15–25 ans […] Et il paraît que Le Hobbit sera du même acabit. […] Tolkien est devenu un monstre, dévoré par sa popularité et absorbé par l'absurdité de l'époque […] Le fossé qui s'est creusé entre la beauté, le sérieux de l'oeuvre, et ce qu'elle est devenue, tout cela me dépasse. Un tel degré de commercialization réduit à rien la portée esthétique et philosophique de cette création. Il ne me reste qu'une seule solution: tourner la tête. »

“They gutted the book to make an action film for 15-25 year olds [...] and it seems like The Hobbit will be of the same type. […] Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his popularity and absorbed by the absurdity of today. [...] The gap that has opened up between the beauty, the seriousness of the work and what has become of it, I don't understand any of this. At such a level of commercialization, the aesthetic and philosophical power of this creation dissolves into nothing. For me there is only one solution: to turn away. "

- Christopher Tolkien

Christopher Tolkien died in the south of France in January 2020 at the age of 95 . Tolkien had last lived here with his second wife Baillie Tolkien. He also left three children, including the writer Simon Tolkien .

Works

Editions

  • Works and source collections of his father JRR Tolkien
    • 1975: Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings.
    • 1975: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo.
    • 1977: The Silmarillion .
    • 1980: News from Middle-earth .
    • 1981: Letters of JRR Tolkien.
    • 1983: The History of Middle-earth. Volume I, The Book of Lost Tales. part I
    • 1984: The History of Middle-earth. Volume II, The Book of Lost Tales. part II
    • 1985: The History of Middle-earth. Volume III, The Lays of Beleriand.
    • 1986: The History of Middle-earth. Volume IV, The Shaping of Middle-earth.
    • 1987: The History of Middle-earth. Volume V, The Lost Road (and other writings) .
    • 1988: The History of Middle-earth. Volume VI, The Return of the Shadow.
    • 1989: The History of Middle-earth. Volume VII, The Treason of Isengard.
    • 1990: The History of Middle-earth. Volume VIII, The War of the Ring.
    • 1992: The History of Middle-earth. Volume IX, Sauron Defeated.
    • 1993: The History of Middle-earth. Volume X, Morgoth's Ring.
    • 1994: The History of Middle-earth. Volume XI, The War of the Jewels.
    • 1996: The History of Middle-earth. Volume XII, The Peoples of Middle-earth.
    • 2002: The History of Middle-earth Index.
    • 2007: The children of Húrin .
    • 2010: The legend of Sigurd and Gudrún .
    • 2014: Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary.
    • 2015: King Arthur's downfall .
    • 2017: Beren and Lúthien
    • 2018: The fall of Gondolin

Edits

  • Gabriel Turville-Petre (Ed.): Hervarar Saga ok Heiðreks. Viking Society of Saga Literature, London 1956.
  • The Saga of King Heiðrek the Wise. Nelson, Edinburgh / London 1960.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Guardian. In: guardian.co.uk. Retrieved January 20, 2020 .
  2. ^ Editor and Scholar Christopher Tolkien awarded Bodley Medal. Retrieved June 19, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Maev Kennedy: Tolkien annotated map of Middle-earth acquired by the Bodleian library . In: The Guardian . May 3, 2016, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed January 16, 2020]).
  4. ↑ New Tolkien Book: Middle-earth Is Back. In: Der Spiegel .
  5. ^ Tolkien, l'anneau de la discorde. on lemonde.fr (French)
  6. ^ Tolkien, l'anneau de la discorde . July 9, 2012, ISSN  1423-3967 ( letemps.ch [accessed January 17, 2020]).
  7. ↑ Tolkien's son and administrator Christopher dies. In: news.ORF.at. ORF Online and Teletext GmbH & Co KG, January 16, 2020, accessed on January 16, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Katharine Q. Seelye, Alan Yuhas: Christopher Tolkien, Keeper of His Father's Legacy, Dies at 95. In: The New York Times , January 16, 2020 (English). Retrieved January 17, 2020.
  9. ↑ The Fall of Arthur ( Memento June 10, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) at Harper Collins.
personal data
SURNAME Tolkien, Christopher
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tolkien, Christopher John Reuel (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British Anglic and Scandinavian Medievalist, author, son of JRR Tolkien
DATE OF BIRTH November 21, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Leeds
DATE OF DEATH January 16, 2020
Place of death Draguignan