LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Christopher Tolkien: Works
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Tolkien's son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, edited the vast collection of manuscripts, together with maps and illustrations, and these were posthumously published in twelve volumes as "The History of Middle-earth." One of the single largest works of 'literary archaeology' ever undertaken.
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[One] problem with Tolkien's work ... is that toward the end of his life, he began contemplating changing major features of the mythology that stretched back to the earliest versions. A lot of these changes had to do with cosmology, with the sun and moon, and changing Arda (the earth) from a flat-world to a round world. In the original mythology, and the 1977 version, Arda begins as a flat world but is made into a round world. Tolkien contemplated other major changes that would have totally changed much of the more distinguishable features of the mythology, stable features present from the very beginning. Consult "Myths Transformed" in MORGOTH'S RING, Vol. 10 of THE HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH for more information.
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After Gandalf was lost in Moria, Tolkien took a long break in the writing of LotR. He stopped work in December 1942 and resumed in April 1944. Tolkien’s main preoccupation in The War of the Ring was chronology. Because the company had split up, and he was cutting between the dispersed members of the Fellowship — Frodo and Sam in Mordor, Merry and Pippin in Fangorn Forest and Aragorn, Legolas, Gandalf and Gimli in Rohan — Tolkien had difficulty bringing the different threads of the narrative into chronological harmony. Because he wanted to show that the seemingly random fortunes of each character were part of a larger pattern, it was necessary to link them through their shared experience of the natural world. He became obsessed with the synchronization of the characters’ movements, the weather and the phases of the moon.
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Tolkien made his reputation as a Middle English scholar in the 1920s with A Middle English Vocabulary (1922) and Sir Gawain and The Green Knight (1925). Among his later works was the 1936 lecture, later published, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. He was ... interested in the Finnish national epos Kalevala, from which he found ideas for his imaginary language guenya and which influenced several of his stories. Most of the inhabitants of Tolkien's imaginary Middle-Earth are derived from English folklore and mythology, or from an idealized Anglo-Saxon past.
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The Tolkien Estate is the legal body which manages the copyrights of J. R. R. Tolkien's works. It mainly holds the copyright over the literary texts. Executors of the estate include Christopher Tolkien, his wife Baillie Tolkien, and Christopher's nephew Michael Tolkien. Cathleen Blackburn of Manches & Co. has been the estate's solicitor for many years.
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Tolkien served as a communications officer during the Battle of the Somme. He came down with trench fever on 27 October 1916 and was evacuated to England on 8 November 1916. Many of his dearest friends, including Gilson and Smith of the T.C.B.S., were killed in the war. In later years, Tolkien indignantly declared that those who searched his works for parallels to the Second World War were entirely mistaken.
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