The French website Var-matin reported about an hour ago that Christopher Tolkien passed away in a hospital in southern France. He was 95.
The last book he edited, The Fall of Gondolin, was published in 2018.
J.R.R. Tolkien had four children with his wife, Edith: John, Michael, Christopher, and Priscilla, she being the one surviving sibling.
CJRT’s offerings from his father’s legacy have spanned almost my entire adult life.
JRRT died a fgew weeks after Iturned 18 in 1973. In 1975, the year I turned 20, came the first of Christopher’s releases of his father’s unpublished work, the translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. Within a few years we had The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales. People have differing favorites from among the items in the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth; mine include The Notion Club Papers and Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth. 2018 gave us the final — I assume — CJRT/JRRT book, The Fall of Gondolin.
When JRRT died in 1973, we could not have imagined the riches that his son would share with us.