LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Christopher Tolkien
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Perhaps it is because of the above inseparatable connections with his father, that Christopher Tolkien is highly protective of Tolkien's works. But this generally known approach should not be construed to mean arragance. Rather, it is derived from a son's love and memory of his father. And from many documentary wherein Christopher talked about his father, it was not hard to observe he is ... a gentle and humble scholar.
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Christopher Tolkien, who formerly taught at Oxford University, is J.R.R. Tolkien's son and literary executor. The editor of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales as well as the twelve-part series The History of Middle-earth, he lives in France.
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All the previous volumes Christopher Tolkien has released have been done with impeccable scholarship. Much of the narrative of the Children of Hurin is contained in fragmentary form in these books, specifically in ‘Unfinished Tales’. If you’ve read these, then you know that the Children of Hurin is one of Tolkien’s most sorrowful and tragic stories. This is not a feel-good tale. But, of course, Tolkien maintains his inimitable vision of stoic heroism throughout. Tolkien was never engaged in writing stories of “when bad things happen to good people” so much as “when bad things happen to Great and Noble Souls”.
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Christopher Tolkien has a lengthly foreward and appendix, explaining his editorial process, and describing the source materials used to create the novel. Foremost is C. Tolkien's insistence that the novel is published "with a minimum of editorial presence, and above all, in continuous narrative without gaps or interruptions, if this could be done without distortion or invention, despite the unfinished state in which [J.R.R. Tolkien] left some parts of it." (p.7, Preface) I expect that this process may have a deliberate effect on the story, as some of the passages are only summaries of action, contain alternate tellings, or are threads dropped or terminated with little or no pretense.
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After graduating from university, Christopher Tolkien worked as a tutor and lecturer in the English Faculty while completing a B.Litt. thesis, a commented edition and translation of the Old Norse Hervarar Saga. The study was published in 1960 as The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise. It is ... during the 1950s that Chr. Tolkien begins to make a name for himself as a philologist and medievalist. Thus, he discussed the possible historical elements in the Old Norse poem "The Battle of the Goths and the Huns" and published the paper in 1955-56 in the Saga-Book (University College, London, for the Viking Society for Northern Research). In 1956 he wrote the introduction to E.O.G.
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In September 2006, Christopher Tolkien, who had spent 30 years working on his father's unpublished manuscripts, announced that The Children of Húrin has been edited into a completed work for publication in 2007. J. R. R. Tolkien had first written what he called the Húrin's saga (and later the Narn) in 1918, and rewritten it several times, including as an epic poem, but never completed his mature, novelistic version. Extracts from the latter had been published before by Christopher Tolkien in "Unfinished Tales", with other texts appearing in The Silmarillion and his later literary investigations of The History of Middle-earth.
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Christopher Tolkien