Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (21 November 1924 – 16 January 2020) was an English and naturalised French academic editor. The son of author and academic J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien edited much of his father's posthumously published work, including The Silmarillion and the 12-volume (plus one volume of indexes) series The History of Middle-Earth. Tolkien also drew the original maps for his father's The Lord of the Rings. Outside his father's unfinished works, Christopher Tolkien edited three tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (with Nevill Coghill) and his father's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Early life Tolkien was born in Leeds, England, the third of four children and youngest son of John Ronald Reuel and Edith Mary Tolkien (née Bratt). He was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford, and later at The Oratory School. He entered the Royal Air Force in mid-1943 and was sent to South Africa for flight training, completing the elementary flying course at 7 Air School, Kroonstad, and the service flying course at 25 Air School, Standerton. He was commissioned into the general duties branch of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve on 27 January 1945 as a pilot officer on probation (emergency) and was given the service number 193121. He briefly served as an RAF pilot before transferring to the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve on 28 June 1945. His commission was confirmed and he was promoted to flying officer (war substantive) on 27 July 1945. After the war, he studied English at Trinity College, Oxford, taking his B.A. in 1949 and his B.Litt. a few years later. Career Tolkien had long been part of the critical audience for his father's fiction, first as a child listening to tales of Bilbo Baggins (which were published as The Hobbit), and then as a teenager and young adult offering much feedback on The Lord of the Rings during its 15-year gestation. He had the task of interpreting his father's sometimes self-contradictory maps of Middle-earth in order to produce the versions used in the books, and he re-drew the main map in the late 1970s to clarify the lettering and correct some errors and omissions. Tolkien was invited by his father to join the Inklings when he was 21 years old, making him the youngest member of the informal literary discussion society that included C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, Warren Lewis, Lord David Cecil,