2. Despite dying in 1973, new Tolkien work continues to be published
Though he is still most famous for The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings, Tolkien wrote many other poems, short stories, and novels based in Middle Earth. Some of these were published in his lifetime, but when he died in 1973 he left behind a vast collection of unpublished work of which his son, Christopher Tolkien, was left in charge. In the intervening 45 years, Christopher has dedicated his life to the mammoth task of publishing these scribblings for the first time. Many Tolkien fans however grumble that he is like Smaug sitting jealously on a pile of treasure.
In Christopher’s defense, many of the manuscripts are in note form or incomplete, and require a lot of work to meet his father’s exacting standards. For example, Tolkien’s handwritten translation of Beowulf was completed in the 1920s, but he never made any plans to publish it, and went back to correct certain parts over the next half-century. Christopher thus had the difficult task of deciding which corrections to include, and whether his father would have wanted it to see the light of day at all. Having 10 new things published after your death isn’t bad going at all, either.
