Who edited and published J.R.R. Tolkien’s posthumous book The Silmarillion?

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

The Silmarillion was published in 1977, four years after Tolkien’s death. Christopher Tolkien worked through a large and sometimes contradictory body of drafts, revisions, notes, and unfinished texts to create a publishable volume. The book presents the creation of the world and the major myths and histories of Tolkien’s imagined universe.

Unlike The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion was not completed as a final novel by Tolkien during his lifetime. Its material reaches back to stories he began developing during and after the First World War. Christopher’s editorial work therefore involved selection, arrangement, and presentation rather than simply copying a finished manuscript.

Christopher Tolkien continued publishing related works, including Unfinished Tales and multi-volume studies of his father’s papers. Readers sometimes confuse him with Christopher Tolkien the author of those later editions, but he was also Tolkien’s third son and literary executor.