Death of Christopher Tolkien

[Formendacil]

I've spent since last night trying to find words for this... the best I have come up with is something I wrote to a friend on Facebook last night:

"I have... a lot of thoughts about his passing. It feels a bit melodramatic to say, but it's probably true: his death will be roughly as important in my life as the deaths of Benedict XVI or Queen Elizabeth will be, in the sense that he's one of the pillars holding up the backdrop to the world as I've known it so far.

...the phrase that I literally just typed elsewhere is "cultural grandfather." I have a claim on Christopher Tolkien only in the sense that a few million Tolkien fans do--of gratitude for his scholarship and prudent guidance of his father's literary estate--but it's still a loss that feels personal."

Part of the grandfather analogy, no doubt, is that I've always remembered CT's age as the same as my own grandfather's--a fact that has anchored my sense of time and generation whenever I've thought of Tolkien's biography. Fittingly enough, all my grandparents have passed, and this sense of bereavement is no doubt partly that of a passing age.