The Tolkien Estate is the legal body that manages the copyright for most of J. R. R. Tolkien’s works. The estate has assigned the individual copyrights to the Trust. The Tolkien Trust is a U.K. registered charity established in 1977 by the author’s four children, J R R Tolkien, to enable the Tolkien family to regularly give to its chosen charitable causes.
Tolkien Trust
The Trust is wholly discretionary, which means that its constitution does not impose any limitations on the charities it may benefit; the trustees are, therefore, free to select those causes of interest to them. The Trust has traditionally supported a broad spectrum of charitable causes throughout the world, including:
- Arts
- Education
- Environment
- Homelessness
- International development
- International relations and peacebuilding
- Migration
- Prison Reform
- U.K. and international health and medical research
Tolkien Company
The Tolkien family has organized all of their assets, including their estate, under a company called The Tolkien Company. The directors of this company were Christopher Tolkien until August 2017, his wife, Baillie Tolkien, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s grandson, Michael. Christopher Tolkien, the only person responsible for managing his father’s literary works, was the estate’s executor until his death in January 2020. Cathleen Blackburn of Maier Blackburn has been the estate’s solicitor for many years, taking over from J.R.R. Tolkien’s lawyer, Frank Williamson.
Amazon
In November 2017, Amazon Studios announced that they had bought the rights to make a T.V. series based on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. The series won’t be exactly like the books; instead, it will include prequels to The Lord of the Rings. The deal also included the possibility of making another series.
Earlier this year, Warner Bros confirmed that more Lord of the Rings films are coming over the next few years.
The Fellowship of the King
The Rights holders of Tolkien’s books have won two legal battles in the U.S. Following the publishing of a sequel to The Lord of the Rings without permission.
The estate sued Demetrious Polychron, a fan fiction writer, for copyright infringement after he published “The Fellowship of the King”, his sequel to The Lord of the Rings.
According to court documents, The Fellowship of the King included significant characters from “Lord of the Rings,” including Samwise Gamgee, Aragorn and Sauron, as well as verbatim copying of at least 15 poems or passages from the Lord of the Rings trilogy; the use of Middle-earth and dozens of other settings from the original books, described in detail; and the duplication of a central plot and structure, among other copied elements. Court documents state that Polychron had imagined a series of seven books entitled “The War of the Rings.”
“This is a significant success for the Tolkien Estate, which will not permit unauthorized authors and publishers to monetize J.R.R. Tolkien’s much-loved works in this way,”
Steven Maier solicitor Tolkien Estate’s U.K.
Polychron repeatedly tried to share his manuscript with the Tolkien estate, which declined to grant the rights to a third-party publication and noted its policy not to license other writers to create sequels or extensions of work by Tolkien, who died in 1973. Still, Polychron went ahead and self-published his book.
Polychron emailed and then hand-delivered a gift-wrapped copy of his book to Simon Tolkien, the author’s grandson, at his home in Santa Barbara, California, in 2017. Enclosing a letter in which Polychron said he had written “the obvious pitch-perfect sequel” to Tolkien’s Middle-earth trilogy and claimed his goal was “to stick as close to canon as I could.”
Polychron’s copyright action
In April, Polychron sued the Tolkien estate and Amazon for $250 million in compensation claiming that “Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power,” an Amazon Prime Video prequel series released last year and one of the few adaptations authorized by the Tolkien estate, infringed on the copyright of his book even though his book is fan fiction based entirely on the earlier works of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Polychron said in court documents that Tolkien and the original “Rings” inspired the series. Still, he argued that he created a “wholly original book and concept” for the sequel, including “separate characters and storylines that compose as much as one-half of the 8-episode series” released by Amazon infringed on the copyright in his book and his planned sequels.
The Court dismissed the case, ruling that as Polychron’s book infringed on Amazon’s prequel, released in September 2022 it could not be the basis for a legitimate copyright claim.The Court ruled that Polychron must stop distributing copies of the book and destroy all physical and electronic copies.
The Tolkien Estate then filed a separate lawsuit against Polychron, seeking an injunction to stop “The Fellowship of the King” from being further distributed. In dismissing Polychron’s case, the Court labelled it “frivolous and unreasonably filed” and granted the permanent injunction, preventing sales of the book and any other planned sequels.
The Court also awarded lawyers’ fees totalling £106,000 to the Tolkien Estate and Amazon concerning Polychron’s lawsuit.
Summary Judgment
In official U.S. Court rulings issued by Judge Steven V. Wilson on December 14 of this year, the Court awarded the Tolkien Estate summary judgment on its infringement claim.
“This case involved a serious infringement of The Lord of the Rings copyright, undertaken on a commercial basis, and the estate hopes that the award of a permanent injunction and attorney’s fees will be sufficient to dissuade others who may have similar intentions.”
Summary judgment grants the J.R.R. Tolkien Estate a permanent injunction that prevents Polychron from distributing any further work based on the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, including any current or future copies of “The Fellowship of the King,” any of Polychron’s intended sequels to the infringing novel, and any other potential books derived from the illegally sourced content.