The death on 16 January of Christopher Tolkien has of course deprived us of an increasingly rare living link with the incomparable Professor JRR Tolkien, author of “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings”.
It may also have deprived us of further works by Professor Tolkien. Christopher Tolkien was his father’s literary executor and was primarily responsible for turning a vast quantity of Professor Tolkien’s unpublished manuscripts into published works. Professor Tolkien’s great friend CS Lewis (creator of Narnia and author of many other famous works) wrote to an American academic about Professor Tolkien:
“His published works (both imaginative and scholarly) ought to fill a shelf by now: but he’s one of those people who is never satisfied with a [manuscript]. The mere suggestion of publication provokes the reply “Yes. I’ll just look through it and make a few finishing touches” – which means that he really begins the whole thing over again.” [Lewis to Charles A Brady, 29 October 1944, in “CS Lewis Letters”, 1988, Fount Paperbacks]
(In that letter Lewis predicts that the Lord of the Rings “will soon be finished”. The first instalment was published in 1954, which suggests that Lewis’ comments about his friend were not unjustified.)
Christopher Tolkien took charge of the massive quantity of his father’s fantasy writing which, at Professor Tolkien’s death, remained in the state of perpetual revision alluded to by Lewis in that letter, and turned immense quantities of it into coherent works which did credit to his father’s genius. I am not aware of any announcement as to whether Professor Tolkien’s heirs plan to permit any more editing and publication of whatever (if anything) remains of Professor Tolkien’s unpublished work. We may see no new Tolkien material now that Christopher is gone.
We will also never again receive further first hand accounts of “the Inklings”, the informal literary group of which the Tolkiens, father and son, were members, along with CS Lewis and other accomplished writers like the philosopher Owen Barfield (sometimes called the father of postmodernism), Charles Williams (writer of supernatural thrillers and other works) and Lord David Cecil (biographer of British Prime Minister Lord Melbourne). Christopher Tolkien was the youngest member, present initially only as his father’s guest but soon becoming a member in his own right. He was also the last to survive.
The Inklings frequently discussed each others’ works in progress, and Professor Tolkien was later to attribute the completion of Lord of the Rings to Lewis’ unceasing encouragement in particular. That is not to say that there were no rivalries or resentments among the Inklings, but overall they may be assessed by Lewis’ allusion to the Inklings in his non-fiction book “The Four Loves”, in the section in praise of “friendship”. He wrote that among true friends the loss of one has the effect of depriving each of the survivors of a part of all the others. “Now that Charles [Williams] is dead, I shall never again see [John] Ronald [Reuel Tolkien]’s reaction to a specifically Caroline [i.e. Charles-like] joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him “to myself” now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald.”
Now that we have no Inklings left, we all have less. We can be grateful, though, for all the great literature that Christopher Tolkien and all the Inklings have left for us.