Christopher Tolkien

The third son, and the one to whom the legendarium finally fell. He heard the drafts read aloud, drew maps for The Lord of the Rings, and received the wartime letters in which his father worked out what the book was about. After 1973 he spent more than forty years editing the unpublished papers: The Silmarillion in 1977, Unfinished Tales, and the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth, in which he set out the drafts and his own editorial reasoning side by side. Almost everything this site can cite beyond the two novels exists because of that work — and the question of how much editor there is in an edited text is one he raised himself.