J. R. R. Tolkien members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972. After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including "The Silmarillion". These, together with "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings", form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and Middle-earth within it. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term "legendarium" to the
J. R. R. Tolkien Award for Best Fantasy novel in 1978. In 1980 Christopher Tolkien published a collection of more fragmentary material, under the title "Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth". In subsequent years (1983–1996) he published a large amount of the remaining unpublished materials, together with notes and extensive commentary, in a series of twelve volumes called "The History of Middle-earth". They contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative, and outright contradictory accounts, since they were always a work in progress for Tolkien and he only rarely settled on a definitive version for any of the stories. There is not complete consistency between "The Lord of