Christopher was the first name of J.R.R. Tolkien’s eldest son and literary editor.
Christopher Tolkien was born in 1924 and became the principal editor and interpreter of his father’s unpublished Middle-earth writings after J.R.R. Tolkien’s death. He assembled, compared, and edited manuscripts that had been written across many decades.
His editorial work produced The Silmarillion in 1977 and later the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth series. These books made a large amount of Tolkien’s drafts, revisions, and notes available to readers, while also documenting how the mythology changed over time.
Christopher Tolkien was not simply transcribing a finished manuscript. His father left multiple versions of stories, inconsistent names, unfinished passages, and alternative conceptions. Christopher had to make editorial choices while explaining those choices in introductions and notes. This is why posthumous books such as The Silmarillion differ in presentation from novels Tolkien published during his lifetime.