Tolkien Estate

The Tolkien Estate is the legal body which manages the property of the English writer J. R. R. Tolkien, including the copyright for most of his works. The individual copyrights have for the most part been assigned by the estate to subsidiary entities such as the J. R. R. Tolkien Discretionary Settlement and the Tolkien charitable trust. The various holdings of the Tolkien family, including the estate, have been organized under The Tolkien Company, the directors of which were Christopher Tolkien until August 2017 and his wife Baillie Tolkien, and J. R. R. Tolkien's grandson Michael George Tolkien. The executors of the estate were Christopher Tolkien (died 16 January 2020^[1]), who was sole literary executor, and (succeeding J.R.R. Tolkien's lawyer Frank Williamson) Cathleen Blackburn of Maier Blackburn,^[2] who has been the estate's solicitor for many years.