[Kay] spent a year, between 1974 and 1975, in Oxford helping Christopher Tolkien put together The Silmarillion, JRR Tolkien’s history of Middle-earth. It was quite the training ground for “a Canadian prairie boy”, in Kay’s words.

The job had come about through a family connection – Christopher Tolkien’s second wife was Canadian, and the two families knew each other. When Tolkien was made literary executor for his father’s estate, he decided he needed help, and Kay ended up being drafted in.

“It was a massive, massive project,” says Kay. “And he did not want another fully fledged academic working with him. Family privacy, anxiety, ego elements came into it. And at the time he saw the editing process in the classic ‘senior academic working with the bright young graduate student’ way, which is the template for so much academic work.” - from a retrospective on Kay's career published in The Guardian in 2014.