Christopher Tolkien at 100: a celebration

About the event

Over more than four decades, JRR Tolkien’s son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien published some twenty-four volumes of his father’s work, much more than his father had succeeded in publishing during his own lifetime. Christopher gave up his own distinguished academic career as a fellow and tutor in English at Oxford, to devote his energies to publishing his father’s literary and academic works. His extraordinary scholarship and painstaking editorial work have brought to light the vast scale and richness of JRR Tolkien’s legendarium and delighted Tolkien readers the world over.

This series of short talks by Oxford scholars will explore Christopher Tolkien’s achievements as a scholar, writer and editor. A special one-day display of original material from the Tolkien archive will be on show for attendees.

Speakers

Baillie Tolkien has a BA from the University of Manitoba and an MA from Oxford. She married Christopher Tolkien in 1967, and edited J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters from Father Christmas in 1976. She is a director of the Tolkien Estate and a trustee of the Tolkien Trust, as well as Christopher’s literary executor and trustee of his Estate.

Richard Ovenden is Bodley’s Librarian and holds a Professorial Fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford. He was made OBE in 2019. He is the author of Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack (2020) and co-editor of The Great Tales Never End: Essays in memory of Christopher Tolkien (2022).

Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language and Literature, and Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford. His most recent publications include Bagels, Bumf and Buses: A day in the life of the English language (2019), Osbern Bokenham’s Lives of the Saints (2020) and C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (2024).

Grace Khuri has a BA (English Language and Literature) and MPhil (Medieval English) from Merton College, Oxford, and is currently a DPhil candidate writing on ‘Tolkien’s Eldar Edda: Norse Myth, the Great War and the Writing of ‘The Silmarillion’’. She is the first doctoral candidate at Oxford to write solely on Tolkien.

Catherine McIlwaine is the Tolkien Archivist at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. She is the author of Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth (2018), and curated the Bodleian’s summer exhibition of the same name in 2018. She is co-editor of The Great Tales Never End: Essays in memory of Christopher Tolkien (2022).

Giuseppe Pezzini is Associate Professor of Latin Language and Literature, and a Fellow and Tutor at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the Tolkien editor for the Journal of Inklings Studies, and his forthcoming monograph on Tolkien’s theory of imagination will be published by Cambridge University Press in the coming months.

Booking information

This event is available to attend in person at the Weston Library.

The event is free and open to all but booking is required. When you have booked your place, the ticketing system will send you an automated confirmation.