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The Dude
Ossiriand
Jan 17 2020, 12:19am
Post #26 of 76
(2171 views)
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Thank you for posting the link to the video.
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This was Christopher's last public appearance, just under a year ago. It was the unveiling of a series of Aubusson tapestries based on his father's paintings.
His speech (in French) is very touching. Fortunately subtitled!(is there no way to embed videos?)
I had seen snippets of it before, but never the whole video. Even at such an advanced age, Christopher's intelligence shone through; and in the lovely English accent of his French speech, one could still hear the voice of his father; whose legacy he had made so much brighter and larger throughout the years. With his passing, the end has come of the second Fellowship of the Ring, father and son.
May he rest in peace.
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Morthoron
Hithlum
Jan 17 2020, 12:58am
Post #28 of 76
(2161 views)
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Namárië, Christopher Tolkien...
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So sad to hear of his passing today at the age of 95.
I would say that no single executor of a literary estate/archive has been as faithful and as zealous in protecting an author's work as Christopher Tolkien. What he has accomplished in over 40 years of stewardship is nothing short of remarkable. He will be sorely missed.
Please visit my blog...The Dark Elf File...a slighty skewed journal of music and literary comment, fan-fiction and interminable essays.
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Otaku-sempai
Elvenhome
Jan 17 2020, 1:03am
Post #29 of 76
(2144 views)
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Farewell to the First Steward of Arda.
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Condolences to ChristopherTolkien's family, the members of the Tolkien Estate, his friends and many fans.
#FidelityToTolkien
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Solicitr
Mithlond
Jan 17 2020, 1:24am
Post #30 of 76
(2133 views)
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Even at such an advanced age, Christopher's intelligence shone through; and in the lovely English accent of his French speech, one could still hear the voice of his father; whose legacy he had made so much brighter and larger throughout the years. With his passing, the end has come of the second Fellowship of the Ring, father and son.
Tolkien's two time-travel stories, from which Numenor was born, were both based on the recurrence through time of a father-son pair, Edwin and Alwyn, Audoin and Auboin, Eadwine and Aelfwine, Valandil and Elendil... Blessedness-friend and Elf-friend.
All the more poignant in that Tolkien was not, I think, thinking of his own father, whom he barely remembered. Think how many of his protagonists are orphaned or fatherless!
(This post was edited by Solicitr on Jan 17 2020, 1:25am)
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Ethel Duath
Gondolin
Jan 17 2020, 1:50am
Post #31 of 76
(2123 views)
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I find myself speechless, or almost
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What would we have done without him?
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Hasuwandil
Menegroth
Jan 17 2020, 2:00am
Post #32 of 76
(2119 views)
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He kept his stewardship as faithfully as one could hope. Now he rests from his labors.
Hêlâ Auriwandil, angilô berhtost,
oƀar Middangard mannum gisandid!
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balbo biggins
Nargothrond
Jan 17 2020, 3:07am
Post #33 of 76
(2126 views)
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So sad to hear of his passing today at the age of 95.
I would say that no single executor of a literary estate/archive has been as faithful and as zealous in protecting an author's work as Christopher Tolkien. What he has accomplished in over 40 years of stewardship is nothing short of remarkable. He will be sorely missed.
It's rather depressing seeing people quote film dialogue across social media in remembrance to him 🙄
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Paulo Gabriel
Menegroth
Jan 17 2020, 3:16am
Post #34 of 76
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16th January 2020 has seen the passing of a true legend of fantasy and high-profile literature. R.I.P, Chris Tolkien.
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BOSW
Nevrast
Jan 17 2020, 3:55am
Post #35 of 76
(2099 views)
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The end of an era. What remains of the "First Age" of Tolkien has now passed into the West....
This will go against the grain of this forum, but I positively loathe the Peter Jackson films (in the same way Tolkien despised Walt Disney). I refuse to even watch whatever Orcish mischief Amazon is working up in the pits of Angband. Christopher was the last vanguard against the ultimate stupidification of Tolkien. We can expect a lot worse than slot machines in the future now that he's really gone.
I'll miss looking forward to new volumes - Chris really hit his stride at the end - Gudrun, Arthur, Beowulf....
I join all Tolkien fans in mourning a great scholar and defender of the literary faith.
My eulogy:
https://www.youtube.com/...KI&feature=share
(This post was edited by BOSW on Jan 17 2020, 3:56am)
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Solicitr
Mithlond
Jan 17 2020, 4:21am
Post #36 of 76
(2089 views)
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It is very interesting to go back and reread William Cater's interview/ article "The Filial Duty of Christopher Tolkien", published in the Sunday Times Magazine shortly before the Silmarillion was released, and later reprinted in Ballantine's Tolkien Scrapbook
Filial duty, indeed!
Christopher began 'editing' his father's work at the age of five, correcting his continuity errors as he told The Hobbit, and spent the next 45 years assisting his father, and 45 years perpetuating his legacy.
(This post was edited by Solicitr on Jan 17 2020, 4:23am)
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grammaboodawg
Elvenhome
Jan 17 2020, 11:23am
Post #37 of 76
(2027 views)
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On January 15 in The Lord of the Rings, it's the day Gandalf fell in Khazad-dûm... and the Fellowship crosses Nimrodel and comes to Lothlórien.
We have been there and back again.
TIME Google Calendar
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kzer_za
Menegroth
Jan 17 2020, 12:51pm
Post #39 of 76
(2007 views)
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Truly the end of a fellowship...
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In addition to all his work passing on his father's legacy and publishing the posthumous work, JRR Tolkien originally started The Hobbit partly for him. So in a sense, even LotR proper might not exist without Christopher. RIP
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BOSW
Nevrast
Jan 17 2020, 2:44pm
Post #40 of 76
(1998 views)
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It's appalling to see that most people know only the movies, a retort to all those who said the movies would bring people to the books (I know a few people did read the books, but for the most part the books have been supplanted by the movies, all of which I detest). I had some intense debates on these boards long ago with people who argued that the movies were equally valid and that some folkloric process was happening by which new mediums replaced old; pure nonsense, but I've come to expect nothing more from pop culture junkies.
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The Dude
Ossiriand
Jan 17 2020, 3:29pm
Post #41 of 76
(1989 views)
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Maybe, just maybe, it would be more dignified to write about Christopher Tolkien and his work in this thread, than to repeatedly voice one's opinion about the films.
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Voronwë_the_Faithful
Doriath
Jan 17 2020, 3:34pm
Post #42 of 76
(1975 views)
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Was first sent in letters to Christopher when he was serving with the RAF (if I recall correctly) in South Africa. So he was in a sense the first audience for both The Hobbit (along with his brothers) and LOTR.
'But very bright were the stars upon the margin of the world, when at times the clouds about the West were drawn aside.'
The Hall of Fire
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The Dude
Ossiriand
Jan 17 2020, 3:59pm
Post #43 of 76
(1964 views)
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Christopher's letter to Father Christmas (1937)
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...where he mentions the history of "The Hobbit" reads in a way like a prelude to his own work: "Daddy wrote it ages ago (...) but the ending chapters were rather roughly done, and not typed out at all; he finished it about a year ago".
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BOSW
Nevrast
Jan 17 2020, 4:24pm
Post #44 of 76
(1971 views)
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Is this on-topic enough for you?
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"Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed by the absurdity of our time.The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has gone too far for me. Such commercialisation has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of this creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: turning my head away.
"They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25. And it seems that The Hobbit will be the same kind of film."
Christopher Tolkien
I agree with him. May he rest in peace, his Herculean labors completed.
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The Dude
Ossiriand
Jan 17 2020, 5:07pm
Post #46 of 76
(1957 views)
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If you had bothered to look a little closer...
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...you would have known that I actually favorably quoted parts of the first interview in an earlier post of mine, that is, in another thread.
What is tiresome however, is to reduce Christopher - one day after his passing - to the figure of film-critic-in-chief, as if his greatest contribution was not to pass the wider oeuvre of his father to the world but to say two or three lines about the films, i.e., whose entire body of work could only be viewed through the prism of film - the totality of a visual art form - and not literature. The latter, after all, is what he dedicated his life to. It seems no discussion of Tolkien, neither for their supporters nor their critics, can avoid the films. And therein lies the tragedy of modern mass media.
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Former Steward
Lindon
Jan 17 2020, 6:01pm
Post #47 of 76
(1958 views)
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For nearly fifty years he served as the literary executor of the legacy of his father, JRR Tolkien. He is the one who sorted through the drafts and strata that made The Silmarillion publishable (Houghton Mifflin's first million-copy bestseller). He is the one who brought Unfinished Tales, The Father Christmas Letters, Beren and Luthien, The Fall of Gondolin and all the other posthumous works to eager readers. His monumental literary detective work and editing for the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth was a staggering service to the very real discipline of Tolkien Studies, and took more than a decade to complete.
I had the great privilege of serving as Houghton Mifflin's Tolkien Projects Director for many years and had the opportunity to have some infrequent correspondence with Christopher. Before I dared to reach out to such an intimidating (to me) figure, I read through all the internal editorial correspondence between him and the great editors Austin Olney and Ruth Hapgood - my predecessors in the role of Tolkien steward - and I got a glimpse of the man's sharp wit as well as his profound intelligence.... and became even more intimidated. In letters back and forth touching on everything from the mundane details of publishing to legal challenges from outside to the progress of the next volume to be published, there was almost always a jolly paragraph at the end - from all correspondents - about the lobsters on offer at some cafe, about whether it was a good year for the strawberries, and then offering some veiled apologia over a misunderstanding or a disappointment. I did my best to uphold that legacy.
"My" years were the heady and exhausting years of the Lord of the Rings films. As others have noted he had come to believe that commercialization had corrupted and destroyed his father's legacy, had made it unrecognizable. I argued that we at Houghton had found millions upon millions of new readers because of the films and through our attempts to immunize the audience in advance of the films "just in case" - readers who were experiencing the Real middle-earth and his father's words in the U.S. through the all-consuming efforts of everyone at Houghton. That, I wrote to him, should be considered a good thing for the legacy. Though he clearly had doubts (to say the least) he seemed to suffer this fool prattling on enthusiastically for page after page about strategy and sales figures... perhaps not gladly but with a measure of palpable grace along with the flinty displeasure. In prose both subtle and precise, he made clear that for him The Work was all, as it always had been. And for that I will be eternally grateful.
My heart goes out to Christopher's family, my Tolkien colleagues in the UK at the Trust and at HarperCollins and to this community right here that has done so much in its own way to preserve, protect and promote the legacy of JRR Tolkien.
Clay Harper, ex-Houghton Mifflin Tolkien Projects Director
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The Dude
Ossiriand
Jan 17 2020, 6:18pm
Post #48 of 76
(1923 views)
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Thank you for your post, Mr. Harper.
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Lovely insights, I must say.
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BOSW
Nevrast
Jan 17 2020, 6:47pm
Post #49 of 76
(1911 views)
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I almost certainly benefited from your efforts, for years a friend of mine was gifted with multiples of all new Tolkien publications by the HM rep (he was a book buyer). Those were years of abundance, to be sure. Thank you for sharing your memories with us!
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2ndBreffest
Menegroth
Jan 17 2020, 6:53pm
Post #50 of 76
(1911 views)
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I agree, and it is very sad.
The value of Christopher Tolkien's literary contributions, as well as his tireless efforts to protect the dignity and beauty of his father's work simply cannot be measured. And with that I extend my deepest gratitude, and condolences to the Tolkien family.
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