Thursday was the centenary of the birth of Christopher Tolkien, son and literary executor of JRRT, and the man responsible - directly or indirectly - for all of the books that have come out in the last fifty years since JRRT's death with his name on them. The amount of, often very interesting, unpublished material that JRRT left behind him is very large, possibly unparalleled among major authors; and the amount of dedication displayed by CT towards that material is definitely unparalleled.
So the Tolkien Society held an online conference on Zoom last weekend to celebrate him. Being UK-based, it had rather odd time fixes over here. It started at 2 or 3 AM and finished around noon. Being often up in the middle of the night, I heard some of the early papers, but then I'd go back to bed again and missed more. Of the 28 presentations given, I heard all or part of 17.
More than half of the presentations I heard were personal testimonies of "how I worked with Christopher Tolkien." Someone described him as an 'editor-in-chief' and indeed he subcontracted out much of the work. People like Christopher Gilson, who's edited linguistic material, and Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, who've edited everything, told much the same story: how their correspondence or conversation with CT led to him suggesting they might want to edit something, or at least have some suggestions as to how it might be presented in print, and that this led to a long collaboration in which CT would send photocopies of papers in his possession, carefully annotated (this page is the verso of that page; this part is in red ink; etc.), and showed infinite patience and tolerance for detail in answering questions, but his determination that the work be done right was inflexible.
There were several of these, and the same principle applied to talks by artists who've illustrated the work (Alan Lee and Ted Nasmith), to CT's own editor at his publishing house, and most interestingly to the archivist at Marquette University, where JRRT sold many of his manuscripts back in the 1950s. The talk was mostly a historical account. Not much attention was paid to these papers until CT started to need to consult them for his own work, and he developed a good relationship with the then-archivist. But what CT really needed, especially as his focus on the Marquette material increased, was a dedicated and knowledgeable on-the-spot assistant with the time and energy to do the work. And he got one: the late Taum Santoski. I knew Taum personally, though not as well as some, and I'm delighted he's received this attention in a talk that was almost more about him than about CT.
Other papers were about the work that CT did, some just generally about it being there and implying his importance by the fact that he put it out, but others focusing on the work he did and the complex interlayering of JRRT's basic writings, JRRT's commentaries on them, CT's comments on each, his arrangements of the material and his selections of them. (It's estimated that the four huge volumes on the writing of The Lord of the Rings contain only about 40% of what JRRT wrote.) Then there's the complexity of JRRT's work - the recastings, the revisions and erasures, the stories where the characters misunderstand the lore they've been told, the parts where JRRT himself wasn't sure what the answer was ... and CT's careful presentation of it all. Two papers, by Sara Brown and Kristine Larsen, discussed the Athrabeth, a key text in the legendarium, analyzing all of the layers of writing and the choices involved in editing it, and they and Verlyn Flieger emphasized even CT's courage in publishing this thing, which cut down to the bedrock of the fictional universe and touched the author's own deepest religious beliefs. I got the impression, listening to Sara and Kris speak and reading the chat function, that the mere existence of the Athrabeth was news to a lot of the attendees. There's a lot of exploring yet to be done, so let's get on and do it.
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