Christopher Tolkien

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Diamond is right. This isn't the first time that C.R.T. has been accused of milking his father's notes for every penny he could get, but I don't see it. He didn't sell the film rights to The Silmarillion, which would have been the single easiest way to make a lot of money very quickly out of his father's works, and now that there's even more money involved he's even more reluctant.

How many people really buy the Histories anyway? I can't think that they have the same mass appeal as, say, The Hobbit; and even if they did, there was no need to edit all of the old material together: it could just have been put into folders and sent off to HarperCollins without any commentary or indexing. Also I should like to know why the now very wealthy director of those staggeringly lucrative films is thought obviously to have been in it for love, while the author's son, who has made less money out of more work, is supposed clearly to have been motivated by financial gain. Could it be that Christopher Tolkien's somewhat austere image has something to do with it? Maybe if he wore shorts and described the books as 'cool' more often he wouldn't be a sell-out.