Tag Archives: Christopher Tolkien

Christopher Tolkien 1924-2020

17 Friday Jan 2020

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I had just finished my Tolkien class yesterday when I returned to my office and found my social media sites flooded with news of Christopher Tolkien’s death. Just an hour before, I had been telling my students that, as Tolkien researchers, we owe a great debt to his son Christopher.

My students have been doing presentations on sections of The History of Middle-earth that include drafts of The Lord of the Rings. This exercise gives them just a glimpse of this immense project (12 volumes in all!) that Christopher Tolkien edited. I had just been saying to my students that morning that Christopher has given us all — students, fans, scholars — the means to experience what it is like doing specialized archival research with manuscript drafts. While we only get a few samples of Tolkien’s actual handwriting in The History of Middle-earth (HoMe), which is often the most difficult part of deciphering his actual papers, we can at least gain an understanding of Tolkien’s revision process for The Lord of the Rings, a glimpse into what characters and ideas he was developing and what ideas he knew he wanted from the start.

The presentations I’ve assigned my students are inspired by Yvette Kisor’s article, “Using The History of Middle-earth with Tolkien’s Fiction” which appears in Approaches to Teaching Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Other Works. As she explains on p. 75,

Christopher Tolkien’s commentary, replication of different drafts, description and dating of manuscripts, determination of the order of composition, and other scholarly apparatuses expose students to the editorial tasks that go into the production of any authoritative edition.

But it’s not just Lord of the Rings drafts that are included in HoMe. There is a wealth of material, including unfinished stories like “The Notion Club Papers” which I’ve been working with in recent years. I’ve heard very occasionally the criticism that Christopher shouldn’t have published unfinished drafts without knowing if his father would have wanted the world to see them. But had those drafts been placed in the Bodleian Library with his other unpublished papers, I would have written about them anyway, as researchers do. Instead, Christopher gave access to such materials to a wider public.

HoMe is not the only publication that Christopher produced. Having trained as a medievalist, he edited and translated several medieval texts before resigning his position at Oxford to work full-time on his father’s materials. The Silmarillion is one of the texts that Christopher compiled after his father’s death (with the help of Guy Gavriel Kay), and although he wasn’t satisfied in later years with all of what he had produced, it nevertheless must have been a daunting task to make sense of these disorganized papers, something that his father himself was not able to do. The Silmarillion that was published in 1977 gave the world the first look at the mythology Tolkien had been working on for most of his life — the backdrop, in a way, to the action of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Christopher was always closely bound with his father’s writing. From listening to his story-telling when a child, drawing maps for The Lord of the Rings, typing up drafts, and, as an adult serving in the RAF during the Second World War, reading and commenting on chapters of The Lord of the Rings that his father mailed to him, he knew his father’s work intimately.

Christopher Tolkien dedicated his career to providing us with the materials for understanding his father’s works, and I am immensely grateful for that opportunity.

Here he is reading the ending of The Lord of the Rings:

From JRRT: A Film Portrait of J.R.R. Tolkien, 1996

Notes

The Tolkien Society announcement of Christopher Tolkien’s death.

Yvette Kisor’s essay can be found in Approaches to Teaching Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Other Works, edited by Leslie Donovan, MLA publishers, 2015, pp. 75-83.

An up-to-date list of Christopher Tolkien’s publications can be found on Tolkien Gateway.

Viewing and Re-Viewing Tolkien’s Art

17 Sunday Feb 2019

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The Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth exhibition in Oxford last summer and now at the Morgan Library in New York turns a spotlight on Tolkien as an artist. Being able to see a range of his work, from his patterned doodles on newspaper crossword pages to his Hobbit illustrations, demonstrates how visual art was integral to his creative imagination. There’s something special about seeing the art in person, as if you can move one step closer to the actual hand that produced the work. And sometimes a visit can give you a chance to see the artwork in a new light.

One exhibit that surprised me was Tolkien’s sketchbook opened to the picture, “Alder by a stream.”  I had seen the reproduction in Hammond and Scull’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator (fig. 7) and it’s in Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth (page 129).  Seeing it in real life, though, revealed a smaller notebook than I had imagined, which made the actual watercolour a lovely little pastoral image. (It measures 90 x 130 mm / 3.5 x 5.2 inches). And it was only then that I realized that it was painted around 1906, when Tolkien was still in his early teens.

This image of “Alder by a stream” by Anthony Burdge comes from the New York Tolkien Conference Facebook page. You can see many more photos of the New York show on their public site.

And here’s another image that I wish I could go back to re-view, Tolkien’s illustration of Rivendell.

"Rivendell" by Tolkien
Rivendell, by J.R.R. Tolkien

Those of you who can go to the Morgan Library in New York to see it in person, or even those of us who will make do with a reproduction now have another fact to incorporate into our viewing.  Recently in brief comments by Christopher Tolkien on the occasion of his visit to the Aubusson tapestries illustrating some of Tolkien’s artwork – another event that recognizes Tolkien as an illustrator – he told a story of how one night when he was a child he came to his father while he was painting the image of Rivendell and what happened then. You can hear the story at 3:45 in the video below (in French, with English and Spanish subtitles).

Christopher Tolkien and the “Aubusson weaves Tolkien” project
https://youtu.be/rQmh_Sfq88Y

How can we look at “Rivendell” without thinking of the child’s tear and the father’s patient kindness that are forever part of the image now, for me anyway. I wonder if some people visiting the Morgan Library will think of this late-night scene between Christopher and his father when looking at “Rivendell.”

Detail from Rivendell

Edit, Feb. 18: I have heard from some people that they are finding it difficult or impossible to read the English subtitles in the above video. For a transcript of the subtitles as they appear in the video, click here.

The Morgan Library along with the New York Tolkien Fellowship are sponsoring a series of talks to accompany the exhibition, and I’ll post details of these along with a few other commentaries on the exhibit in a day or two. For now, though, I’ll take one more look back at the Bodleian version of the exhibition, where a series of talks also took place. One of these featured myth specialist Marina Warner and Tolkien scholars Dimitra Fimi and Verlyn Flieger. Their discussion was wide-ranging: language and mythology and the history of fantasy and so many other things. But at one moment in the Q & A, the talk turned to Tolkien’s artwork and its influence on his writing.

At around 1:07:10 in the video linked below, the speakers discuss the importance of maps and other images to Tolkien’s creative process, and then in a response to a question about the role of images, Verlyn Flieger (at around 1:09:45) gives a brief example to explain how Tolkien “is writing to the image.”

Oxford Podcasts: Mythopoeia: Myth-Creation and Middle-earth. https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/mythopoeia-myth-creation-and-middle-earth

I don’t know if it’s just a coincidence, but Professor Flieger’s example of the sketch of Cirith Ungol drawn in the margins of a manuscript draft is exactly the image that my co-author Jeff MacLeod and I discussed in our Tolkien Studies article, “Visualizing the Word: Tolkien as Artist and Writer” (vol. 14, 2017, pp. 115-31). As Professor Flieger is one of the editors who oversaw the publication of our article, I’m hoping she was channelling our argument!  You can read more about our essay here. 

For more on the Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth exhibit, see my previous post a few days ago, “Tolkien’s Favourite Landscape Artist?” and from last June, “Tolkien Art Exhibit at the Bodleian.”

What a day for Tolkien news!

19 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Medievalisms, Old English, Publications, Tolkien

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Tolkien's BeowulfThis morning, in the midst of grading and preparing class notes and answering student emails, I happened to glance at my twitter feed to find that the long-awaited Beowulf translation by Tolkien is about to be published on May 22! Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary is another in a series of publications by the author’s son, Christopher Tolkien, who has also recently edited his father’s The Children of Húrin (2007), The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (2009), and The Fall of Arthur (2013).

This latest book will also include the story “Sellic Spell” (which is Old English for “marvellous story”). Here is what Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond have to say about that story in their J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide:

In the early 1940s Tolkien wrote a story, Sellic Spell (unpublished), as an attempt to reconstruct the Anglo-Saxon tale that lies behind the folk- or fairy-tale element in Beowulf…. He felt, however, that in many points it was not possible to do so with certainty, and in some points the tale was not quite the same. The ‘principal object’ of Sellic Spell,Tolkien wrote in a late note, was ‘to exhibit the difference of style, tone and atmosphere if the particular heroic or historical is cut out’ (Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford). In 1945 Tolkien’s friend Gwyn Jones, Professor of English at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, saw Sellic Spell and remarked that it should be prescribed for all university students of Beowulf.

It certainly sounds like something that I would prescribe for my university students, but any more posthumous publications and I will need several more weeks in the semester to cover everything that I would like!

Brief notices about the book have appeared in The Guardian, The Telegraph, and elsewhere, and John Garth reports that he will have a preview feature in the Guardian Review this Saturday.

But that wasn’t all the Tolkien news of the day.

After I had Journal of Tolkien Research logofinished teaching my evening class, I came home to find an announcement for a new, peer-reviewed, open access journal, The Journal of Tolkien Research, to be edited by Brad Eden at Valparaiso University, with Douglas A. Anderson as the book reviews editor. The aims and scope of the journal are as follows:

The Journal of Tolkien Research (JTR) has the goal of providing high-quality research and scholarship based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) and on transformative and derivative texts based on his work to a wide and diverse audience. This journal will focus on multi- and inter-disciplinary approaches to Tolkien studies, including gaming, media and literary adaptations, fan productions, and audience reception.

A unique feature of this journal is its aim to include not only studies of Tolkien’s texts but also of fan productions and other adaptations, and audience reception — a broad scope that has the potential to bring in scholars from diverse fields and extend our ideas about the reach and impact of Tolkien’s work. The fact that the journal is completely free and open access means that the articles that will be published there will have the potential to find a wide readership. I’m looking forward to the first issue!