Ælfwine, you are right, with the definite article missing it could be read as ‘…A Successor Of Christopher Tolkien’, or as ‘…One Of The Successors Of Christopher Tolkien’.
Firstly, what this is for.
Well, there are many books in Russian imitating Tolkien’s works. ‘The Ring of Darkness’ by Nick Perumov (3 titles, about 700,000 copies overall), ‘The Black Book of Arda’ (different editions, more than 37,000 copies overall), ‘Saga about the Hobbit’ (3 titles, 34,000 copies overall), ‘The Bearer of the Ring’ (5 titles, such as ‘The Hobbit and Gandalf’, ‘The Hobbit and Saruman’, ‘The Hobbit and Gollum’, ‘The Hobbit and the One Ring’ etc., 42,000 copies overall), ‘The Red Chronicle of Middle-earth’ (1,000 copies), and more than two dozens others. Such authors as Lord Dunsany or George MacDonald were published in the series with the big letters TOLKIEN and with the small ‘Predecessors’, and the actual last name of an author. Even parodies were published with covers like that: ‘J.R.R. Tolkien. Parodies. [Below] Bored of the Rings’.
Some people share conspiratorial ideas. I’ve met comments that the ‘greedy’ Tolkiens fabricate the posthumous texts. The name of Carl Hostetter was practically unknown for the Russian language readers until ‘The Nature of Middle-earth’. ‘Parma Eldalamberon’ ‘Vinyar Tengwar’ were not published in Russian, and the names of their editors were mostly unknown. Moreover, volumes 6–12 of ‘The History of Middle-earth’ are still unpublished in Russian.
So, the task of the essay was to show that the editor of ‘The Nature of Middle-earth’ was a skilled, widely recognized, respected professional, and a good and honest person (implying: not a random guy hired by the Estate to sell something Tolkienesque).
So, after the introduction (‘The edition was prepared by Carl Hostetter, an experienced publisher of Tolkien's texts, author of numerous articles on Tolkien linguistics, editor of two magazines on this topic: the printed Vinyar Tengwar and the online Tengwestië, one of the key figures of the association of specialists in Elvish languages, The Elvish Linguistic Fellowship’), in the first part of the essay it is told that Carl Hostetter was interested in Tolkien’s works since late 1970-es, worked in fanzines since 1980-es.
Christopher Tolkien started publishing fragments from his father’s linguistic works in ‘The History of Middle-earth’, and in 1992 he personally invited four skilled enthusiasts including Carl Hostetter to continue publishing such works (‘gave a torch’ using the metaphor in the comment). Despite being in different countries, they became friends, Christopher Tolkien sent to Carl Hostetter and his fellow co-editors his father’s texts and approved their publications. He also approved the project of ‘The Nature of the Middle-earth’.
Then, the task to convince the audience that the texts are genuine, not a recent hoax.
The work took 25 years, and it was hard (for example, it was hard to understand Tolkien’s handwriting). Some of the texts had been published by Carl Hostetter in VT, and became well-known, such as ‘Ósanwe-kenta. Some were partially published in ‘Unfinished Tales’, there were some hints on the existence of the others in ‘The History of the Middle-earth’. The essay shows that because of the limitations of space the texts were not included in UT or, say ‘The Peoples of Middle-earth’.
The last part is dedicated to Hostetter’s life, thoughts (on Tolkien’s works) and plans. The author of the essay wanted to give at least a glimpse of his personality, to show the real man behind the words ‘Edited by…’.
The essay is not ideal, I feel it is outdated. Since 2020 when it was firstly written, the world has changed. ‘The Battle of Maldon’, the chronology of The Lord of the Rings and the extended edition of the letters were published. Carl Hostetter will always be the first one to publish Tolkien’s texts after the death of Christopher Tolkien, but he is no longer the only successor, taking into consideration such editors as Brian Sibley. There is a paragraph explaining the original cover art (which is now mostly useless, for the cover has been changed in the Russian edition). Nevertheless, the essay supports the editor of ‘The Nature of Middle-earth’, and I am grateful to Ælfwine for the reaction.
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