The Silmarillion | 1977, first edition, first impression, signed by Christopher Tolkien

First edition of The Silmarillion, signed by Christopher Tolkien on the front free endpaper.

Octavo. Bound in the publisher’s original navy cloth, lettered in gilt to the spine, and complete with the original dust jacket incorporating emblems designed by J.R.R. Tolkien. A fine copy in a very near fine, price-clipped dust jacket, bright and crisp, with only a trace of fading to the upper portion of the spine and upper cover. The folding map of Beleriand and the Lands to the North, printed in red and black, is present and intact at the rear as issued.

First edition, first impression, published by George Allen & Unwin, London, in 1977. The title page is dated 1977 and the copyright page states “First published in 1977”, without reference to a subsequent impression.

Published four years after J.R.R. Tolkien’s death, The Silmarillion represented the culmination of the mythology he had been developing for more than half a century. The surviving material comprised an enormous and complex body of manuscripts, rewritten narratives, abandoned versions and sometimes contradictory histories. It fell to his son Christopher Tolkien to bring these papers together and establish from them a coherent text for publication. In doing so, Christopher became far more than a conventional editor. His scholarship provided the form in which Tolkien’s mythology of the First Age was first presented to the wider world and laid the foundations for the extensive posthumous publication of his father’s writings that followed.

The scale of anticipation surrounding the book was extraordinary. The British domestic and export issues were produced essentially simultaneously, with approximately 200,000 copies printed between them, reflecting the enormous international demand for a major new Tolkien work following The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Despite the size of the first printing, copies signed by Christopher Tolkien are notably scarce. His signature is encountered only infrequently in first editions of The Silmarillion, and directly signed copies such as this, with the signature written onto the book itself rather than appearing on a separately signed or commissioned bookplate, are particularly desirable.

The significance of Christopher’s signature is especially appropriate to this title. The Silmarillion was the work with which he was most intimately associated, assembled and edited by him from the manuscripts to which his father had devoted much of his creative life. A signed first edition therefore represents not merely an autographed Tolkien book, but a direct connection with the person responsible for preserving, interpreting and ultimately bringing J.R.R. Tolkien’s great mythology into print.

A particularly fine example of the first edition, signed by Christopher Tolkien and retaining its original dust jacket and folding map.