Message #266363

[Argonath]

A retreat in France

But besides The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, Tolkien published very little during his lifetime, certainly nothing to match the success of his two best-sellers. When he died in 1973, a gigantic share of his work remained unpublished.

The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings are actually only episodes in an imaginary history going on for millennia. Christopher Tolkien set out to bring this partly fragmented mythology to light, in a very unusual way. Rather than contenting himself with the books already published, he went to work on something that became a true passion, as becomes evident when he speaks of it: a labor of literary disinterment.

He receives the reporter with disarming kindness in his own house, in the midst of pines and olive trees. It is better hidden than a hobbit hole, and not an easy spot to find. Down a long ochre dirt road, you see a pink house between two dips. The bastide stands among wildflowers, ravishingly pretty and without any obvious signs that indicate large fortunes. A calm, timeless atmosphere reigns here, exactly in the image of its occupants.

The man who lives here is the third of J.R.R. Tolkien's four children and, with his sister Priscilla, the last survivor. Christopher is the executor of his father's will and the general director of the Tolkien Estate, the English enterprise that manages the estate and distributes the royalties from copyright to the heirs: Priscilla and Christopher, six grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren of J.R.R. Tolkien.

The Estate company is of modest size, with only three employees, one of whom is Christopher and Baillie's son, Adam, and is assisted in Oxford by a law office. It also includes a charity branch, the Tolkien Trust, which is mainly concerned with educational and humanitarian projects.

But it is from his French retreat that Christopher Tolkien has been working on the books and answering solicitations. The interior is simple and warm, with books and rugs, comfortable armchairs, and family photos. In one of the images is J.R.R. Tolkien, his two older sons, his wife, and a little baby named Christopher in his mother's arms. From the beginning, no doubt, he was the most receptive audience for his father's work; and the most upset, later, by its evolution.

An extraordinary imagination

The misunderstanding started with The Hobbit, in the middle of the 1930s. Until then, Tolkien had published only one renowned essay on Beowulf, the great epic poem, peopled with monsters that was written in the Middle Ages. His fiction, begun during World War II, remained invisible.

Tolkien was a brilliant linguist, a specialist in Old English, a professor at Oxford and endowed with an extraordinary imagination. His passion was for languages, and he had invented several of them, then built a world to shelter them. By "world" is meant not only stories, but history, geography, customs; in short an entire universe which would serve as a background for his tales.

In 1937, as soon as it was published, The Hobbit immediately became a critical and popular success, to the point where its then publisher, Allen and Unwin, demanded a sequel urgently. Tolkien, though, did not wish to continue in the same vein. He had instead almost finished a narrative of the most ancient times of his universe, which he called The Silmarillion. Too difficult, decreed the publisher, who continued to harass him. The writer, a bit half-heartedly, accepted the project of writing a new story. In fact, he was about to set in place the first stone of what would become The Lord of the Rings.

But he did not forget about The Silmarillion, nor did his son. Christopher Tolkien's oldest memories were attached to the story of the beginnings, which his father would share with the children. "As strange as it may seem, I grew up in the world he created," he explains. "For me, the cities of The Silmarillion are more real than Babylon."

On a shelf in the living room, not far from the handsome wooden armchair in which Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings, there is a small footstool covered in worn needlepoint. This is where Christopher sat, age 6 or 7, to listen to his father's stories. "My father could not afford to pay a secretary," he says. "I was the one who typed and drew the maps after he did the sketches."