Who prepared J.R.R. Tolkien’s unfinished The Silmarillion for publication after his death?

Christopher Tolkien prepared J.R.R. Tolkien’s unfinished The Silmarillion for publication after his father’s death.

J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973, leaving a large and complex collection of drafts, versions, notes, and incomplete narratives about the history of Arda. Christopher Tolkien edited this material into a coherent published volume, which appeared in 1977 with assistance from the writer Guy Gavriel Kay.

The Silmarillion is not a conventional novel like The Hobbit. It contains creation mythology, heroic legends, genealogies, and accounts of the First and Second Ages. Because Tolkien repeatedly revised many of these stories, Christopher had to compare variant texts and make editorial decisions about arrangement and presentation.

Christopher later edited many additional volumes of his father’s writings, including The History of Middle-earth. Readers sometimes assume The Silmarillion was completed by J.R.R. Tolkien in final form, but the 1977 book is fundamentally an editorial reconstruction from posthumous materials.