This is an actual quote of Christopher Tolkien's from an article by Adam Tolkien regarding his father's work editing the material for 'The Children of Hurin.' The link cited is interesting but not FAQs from Christopher Tolkien and appear to be unsigned. Probably an employee of the publisher.
So from Christopher Tolkien:
"It is undeniable that there are a very great many readers of The Lord of the Rings for whom the legends of the Elder Days (as previously published in varying forms in The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle-earth) are altogether unknown, unless by their repute as strange and inaccessible in mode and manner. For this reason it has seemed to me for a long time that there was a good case for presenting my father's long version of the legend of the Children of Húrin as an independent work, between its own covers, with a minimum of editorial presence, and above all in continuous narrative without gaps or interruptions, if this could be done without distortion or invention, despite the unfinished state in which he left some parts of it.
"When my father was a young man, during the years of the First World War and long before there was any inkling of the tales that were to form the narrative of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, he began the writing of a collection of stories that he called The Book of Lost Tales. That was his first work of imaginative literature, and a substantial one, for though it was left unfinished there are 14 completed tales. Among the Lost Tales three were of much greater length, and all three are concerned with Men as well as Elves: the stories of Beren and Lúthien, the Children of Húrin, and The Fall of Gondolin. In 1951, three years before the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring, he told of his early intention: 'I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched.'
"It thus seems unquestionable, from my father's own words, that if he could achieve final and finished narratives on the scale he desired, he saw the three 'Great Tales' as works sufficiently complete in themselves as not to demand knowledge of the great body of legend known as The Silmarillion."
