Classic decent Englishman Christopher Tolkien, guardian of the Tolkien Estate and protector of his father's works, passes away at age 95:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/o ... -1.5430547$1:
Christopher Tolkien, who played a major role protecting the legacy of his father's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, has died. He was 95.
The Tolkien Society and publisher HarperCollins UK confirmed Tolkien's death. The Centre Hospitalier de la Dracénie, a hospital in southern France, said the son of author J.R.R. Tolkien died there Thursday.
Tolkien's life work was closely identified with that of his father, J.R.R. Tolkien.
The writer's youngest son, he helped edit and publish much of his father's writings after the science fiction and fantasy master died in 1973.
Among the books he worked on were The Silmarillion, The Children Of Hurin, and other texts that flesh out the complex world his father created. He also drew the original maps that adorned the three Lord of the Rings books — The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King — when they were published in the 1950s.
Tolkien Society chairman Shaun Gunner said "millions of people around the world will be forever grateful to Christopher for bringing us" so many of his father's literary works.
"Christopher's commitment to his father's works have seen dozens of publications released, and his own work as an academic in Oxford demonstrates his ability and skill as a scholar," he said.
"We have lost a titan and he will be sorely missed."
With no Christopher Tolkien guiding and expanding the LOTR world there could very well never have been the development of the fantasy genre. There would have been something but it would have been mere swords & sorcery, not the deeper ethical universes that were inspired by JRR Tolkien's foundational works. No LOTR would mean no Game Of Thrones, among endless others that never would have come into being.
Christopher's greatest heroic moment IMO came when, during the hype created by the LOTR movies in the early 2000's, he went to war with Tolkien Enterprises, the American entertainment conglomerate that (along with Warner Brothers/New Line Entertainment) controls the licensing of all Tolkien-related products. The greasy Hollywood/Wall Street bastards had given approval for LOTR slot-machines to be made for distribution in casinos. Christopher found this beyond appalling, and the worst whoring-out of his father's creations imaginable, so he sued them until they put a stop to the wretched idea altogether. There's not much of that kind of dignity left in the this world where everything and everyone seems to be for sale. It was good to see one of the last of a much better generation of people (Christopher was a WW2 Royal Air Force veteran) put those who were so much lesser than himself into retreat.
$1:
He said: "They gutted the book, making it an action movie for 15-25 year-olds."
He added: "Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his popularity and absorbed by the absurdity of the time.
"The gap that has widened between the beauty, the seriousness of the work, and what it has become, all of this is beyond me.
"Such a degree of commercialization reduces to nothing the aesthetic and philosophical scope of this creation. I only have one solution left: turn my head."
He will be greatly missed but his was a life well-lived. Thank you, sir.
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