Curiously (perhaps?), while Les Mondes de Christopher Tolkien is not available on Kindle in the US, it is available in the US on Apple Books:

https://books.apple.com/us/book/les-mo ... age-pour-son/id6737415371

Thanks for the information, Aelfwine, I pass it on to V. Ferré.

yes indeed, and Richard Ovenden's speech has been translated and published
best wishes
vincent

Thanks for sharing, Trotter. That was a nice memory to see again 🙂

Thank you so much Aelfwine for sharing your moving thoughts on Christopher. Really appreciated.

At 16:50, I spy in the top shelf of the small bookshelf behind Christopher, nearly next to Carpenter’s Biography, Hammond (Findegil) and Anderson’s Descriptive Bibliography, and to the left of these Foster’s Complete Guide to Middle-earth and (much less expectedly!) my and Verlyn’s (eds.) Tolkien’s Legendarium. And below these in the bottom shelf I see Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War.

P.S. Yes, I too am an inveterate shelf-scanner!

P.P.S. Thanks to whomever added the still pic!

Thanks Trotter for highlighting the youtube video

Aelfwine wrote:

At 16:50, I spy in the top shelf of the small bookshelf behind Christopher, nearly next to Carpenter’s Biography, Hammond (Findegil) and Anderson’s Descriptive Bibliography, and to the left of these Foster’s Complete Guide to Middle-earth and (much less expectedly!) my and Verlyn’s (eds.) Tolkien’s Legendarium. And below these in the bottom shelf I see Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War.

P.S. Yes, I too am an inveterate shelf-scanner!

P.P.S. Thanks to whomever added the still pic!

What a great thing to spot Aelfwine! Good eye!

Giuseppe Pezzini's brief review of the late war-time correspondence between father and son reminds me of two thoughts I had while reading it in the revised Letters earlier this year:

1) Had Christopher not been nearly 90º of latitude away from his father for most of 1944, there would almost certainly be nothing like the documentation we have of Tolkien's own thoughts at and on this stage of the writing of The Lord of the Rings.

2) I get the sense that having and wishing to share with Christopher across this divide something personal and deeply engaging to both of them is what chiefly impelled Tolkien to resume writing LotR at this time. It is I think no coincidence that what Christopher identified as the "second major halt" in the writing of The Lord of the Rings, which began in 1942, had ended by April 1944, less than 3 months after Christopher had departed for South Africa.

EDIT: Well, I should have waited to listen to the rest of Pezzini's talk before posting this, as he makes himself essentially this last point! But perhaps it bears repeating.

Carl