Simon Tolkien remembers his grandfather

As creator of Middle-earth, and , J.R.R. Tolkien is one of the most successful authors in history. And yet, says Simon Tolkien, the grandfather he remembers seemed to think he had failed.

It wasn't that his work hadn't met with acclaim; by the time of his death in 1973, and were bestsellers. The problem, says Simon, was that the bigger picture Tolkien had wanted the world to know - the complex hinterland of which the books were but a small part - had not been deemed publishable. "He'd produced this huge output that covered everything from the history of the gods to the history of the people. He called it the - that was his great work but it had never seen the light of day despite his best efforts to get it published.

"By the time I knew him he was in his 70s. And it's my perception that from an artistic point of view he was unhappy. The work he had devoted his life to had gone by the board, and that was a distressing realisation. He knew it was too late by then for him to get it published."

That task fell to Simon's father, Christopher, who over the two decades after Tolkien's death published , and . "It's enormously to my father's credit that he took on that huge task.

"I remember the crate-loads of papers arriving at his home, and no one could be in any doubt at the scale of the work he had taken on," Simon says.

"My grandfather had been working on his vast project for about 30 years - he started it during his time in the trenches in 1916. And although it's very sad that he was dead before it was published, it means that people who want to understand Middle-earth and the world of and can do so."