Christopher Tolkien
Christopher John Reuel Tolkien ( born November 21, 1924 in Leeds ) is a British anglistischer and skandinavistischer medievalist. He was a lecturer at the University of Oxford for older English and Scandinavian language and literature. Tolkien has become furthermore known as a literary executor of his father, the British linguist and author JRR Tolkien, a wider audience.
Life and work
He grew up in Oxford, Christopher Tolkien was familiar with as a child of the Middle-earth mythology of his father. Since the late 1930s, part of the literary movement of the Inklings, Christopher Tolkien was crucially involved during the writing of the Lord of the Rings- resistant Guides and subscribers to the accompanying map material with the creation of his father.
After his death it fell to him, the immense amount of material of the unfinished Silmarillion (some stored on scratch paper scraps notes were half a century old ) prepare for publication. For this task he was outstanding suitable both for its unique insight into the creative processes of his father, as well as by his professional activities as a professor of English language at the University of Oxford. In 1977, his company, not least through the help of the author Guy Gavriel Kay, finally crowned with success. Three years later came the news from Middle-earth, a collection 's 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 are collected for the Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings. Without him, these records provide information about the development of various stages text of both works, withheld from the Tolkien - interested public would have remained. In German only the first two volumes, The Book of Lost Tales are published.
In April 2007, Christopher Tolkien published The children of Húrin, another work from sources of his father. The book was published with a global initial print run of 500,000 copies.
In July 2012, Christopher Tolkien spoke for forty years for the first time in the media. In an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde came along with his life's work and the commercialization of Tolkien's world to language, he faces blankly, and by which he classifies the filming of the Lord of the Rings by the New Zealand film director Peter Jackson:
"Ils ont le livre éviscéré, en en un faisant movie d'action pour les 15-25 ans [ ... ] Et il Parait que sera Le Hobbit du même acabit. [ ... ] Tolkien est un monstre devenu, Dévoré par sa Popularité absorbé et par l' époque de l' absurdité [ ... ] Le fossé qui s'est Creuse entre la beauté, le sérieux de l'oeuvre, et ce qu'elle est devenue, tout cela me DEPASSE. Un tel degré de rien à la commercialization réduit portée esthétique et Philosophique de cette création. Il ne me reste qu'une seule solution: tourner la tête. "
"You have eviscerated the book to derive an action film for 15 - to 25 -year-old to make [ ... ] And it seems that 'll be The Hobbit from the same shock. [ ... ] Tolkien has become a monster, swallowed by its popularity and absorbed by the absurdity of today. The ditch, which has opened up between the beauty, the seriousness of the work and what has become of him, all I do not understand. With such a degree of commercialization, the aesthetic and philosophical force of this creation dissolves into nothing. For me there is only one solution: to avert Me ".
Issued works
Christopher Tolkien gave the following books and collections of sources on the works of his father JRR Tolkien out: