Which person edited J.R.R. Tolkien’s posthumous book The Silmarillion?

Christopher Tolkien edited J.R.R. Tolkien’s posthumous book The Silmarillion.

The Silmarillion was published in 1977, four years after Tolkien’s death. Christopher Tolkien organized and edited a large body of unfinished and variant writings left by his father, working with material that had been developed and revised over many decades. The result presents the mythology and history of Tolkien’s imagined world from its creation stories through the First Age and beyond.

The book is not a conventional novel in the same way as The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. It combines creation mythology, annals, legends, genealogies, and narrative sections. Because Tolkien repeatedly revised parts of the mythology, Christopher sometimes had to choose among conflicting versions and connect incomplete passages.

Christopher Tolkien later edited many further volumes of his father’s writings, including The History of Middle-earth. The Silmarillion therefore reflects both J.R.R. Tolkien’s invention and Christopher’s editorial reconstruction of a vast unfinished archive.