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The Fall of Gondolin Edited by Christopher Tolkien


Bilbo

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Excellent!

 

"The Great Tales" are the heart of Tolkien's original concept of Middle Earth, and are deserving of this treatment. All the other stuff in the Silmarillion is basically connective tissue between those stories, and the events of the second and third age (including The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) are mere afterthoughts. The Fall of Gondolin in particular is, I believe, the very earliest of the three, as well.

 

There are two lesser tales that would have benefited an edited, narrative form: The theft of the Jewels and the Voyage of Earendil, essentially the prologue and epilogue to the great tales. But Christopher has done more than enough as it is.

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Superb! It was indeed written very early but takes place late in the history of the First Age, so it's the one most different from the later feel of the stories, but also the one he never got around to properly rewriting. It'll be interesting to see what Christopher does with it. I love how he's not giving up until presenting his father's most important works to the world properly!

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This reminds me - what's a recommended reading order for Tolkien's corpus? I've only read The Hobbit and LOTR, but I'd eventually love to make my way through everything published by him and/or Christopher (including HOME).

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1 minute ago, Gollum Cat said:

This reminds me - what's a recommended reading order for Tolkien's corpus? I've only read The Hobbit and LOTR, but I'd eventually love to make my way through everything published by him and/or Christopher (including HOME).

The Hobbit

The Lord of the Rings

The Silmarilion

Unfinished Tales 

 

BUT

 

I think there’s merit for going with Children of Húrin after Lord of the Rings.

 

The Sil is a huge leap from LotR and you can get bogged down in names. So many names. Really you need to read it a few times. First time just read it and don’t worry about the names too much. Just get the gist. The next time you read it it will make a lot more sense. 

 

Children of Húrin is a lot closer in style to Lord of the Rings so might be a good primer. 

 

I’d say see how you get on with all of that before worrying about the HoME. They’re even more complex than Sil. 

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Children of Húrin is indeed wonderful. Is Beren and Lúthien in the same style? If yes, I guess Gondolin will be, too. Then possibly all 3 can come before Silmarillion so you know the 3 most important storylines well as standalones before you see how they integrate into the greater myth.

The Silmarillion took me three reads until I got emotional at the descriptions of the empty halls of Menegroth near the end.

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11 minutes ago, Holko said:

Children of Húrin is indeed wonderful. Is Beren and Lúthien in the same style? 

 

It isn’t. 

 

It presents all existing versions of the tale with some commentary from Christopher Tolkien. It isn’t a unified text like Húrin. It is expected that Gondolin will be the same as B&L.

 

I would still recommend them after Sil and UT but before HoMe. 

 

There’s a lot of overlap between all these books of course but that’s no harm. 

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55 minutes ago, Gollum Cat said:

I've only read The Hobbit and LOTR, but I'd eventually love to make my way through everything

 

I'd say the main thing that could indicate how much you'd like the further material is whether or not you've read the Appendices and how much you enjoyed them.

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1 hour ago, Bilbo said:

It presents all existing versions of the tale with some commentary from Christopher Tolkien. It isn’t a unified text like Húrin. It is expected that Gondolin will be the same as B&L.

 

Tolkien just left The Children of Hurin at a much more complete form than the other two "great tales", so Christopher could have turned it into a unified narrative. In fact, looking back at the drafts of the three stories, The Children of Hurin was - during its conception - the closest to what we now know it to be, whereas the other two had very substantial changes made.

 

I think its fair to say that The Children of Hurin probably was (or turned out to be) Tolkien's own favorite out of the three, and its easy to see why. To my mind, its Tolkien's best work outside of The Lord of the Rings.

 

Fun fact 1: Professor Lotem, who translated Tolkien's works into Hebrew, was so astonished that Christopher didn't include the events of "The wandering of Hurin" into the book, that he added a footnote summarizing them. To those unfimiliar, Hurin goes to Nargothrond and kills Mim; he tries to get into Gondolin to no avail; he goes to his homeland but is sent away by the easterlings; he gathers a company around him; they go to Menegroth and he gives the Nauglamir to Thingol, facilitating the sack of Doriath; and after arriving at the tomb of his children, he goes to the Haladin and in recounting his story, a riot breaks out which ends the Haladin dynasty, and Hurin eventually throws himself to the sea.

 

Fun fact 2: the main differences between the finished story and the early draft is that the latter omits Nargothrond and Finduilas, and splits the character of Glaurung in two: the dragon whom Turin only meets (and slays) at the climax as he goes out to slay him for his hoard; and a wizard, Kuruki (possibly an precedent to Sauron?) who is the one to cause Nienor's forgetfulness, via a "baneful drink." When Turin finds her, he is said to help her look for her mother, who - in this version fo the story - was also affected. There's also some detail into Turin and Nienor's fate after death: their spirits originally forbidden to pass through Mandos due to their sin, until the spirits of their parents lamented them to the point that the Valar conceded to purify them - and their unborn issue - of their deed in a "bath of flame", and let them live among them until the War of Wrath, where Turin was to slay Ancalagon. Otherwise, its the same story as we know it now. The main plot is the same; A lot of the names are the same or very close; Sauron is even mention at one of the early drafts as having learned of Turin and feared him.

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Just now, Chen G. said:

 

Tolkien just left The Children of Hurin at a much more complete form than the other two "great tales." In fact, looking back at the drafts of the three stories, The Children of Hurin was - in its conception - the closest to what we now know it to be, whereas the other two had very substantial changes.

 

I think its fair to say that The Children of Hurin was (or turned out to be) Tolkien's favorite out of the three, and its easy to see why. To my mind, its Tolkien's best work outside of The Lord of the Rings.

 

Agreed!

5 minutes ago, Holko said:

 

I'd say the main thing that could indicate how much you'd like the further material is whether or not you've read the Appendices and how much you enjoyed them.

 

Also agreed!

 

If you read the Appendices and didn’t enjoy them I’d say to read Húrin is about all there is for you. 

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The Fall of Gondolin, is reported to be written by J.R.R. Tolkien, and edited by Christopher Tolkien.

That John Ronald is a force of nature. Not even death can stop him from writing new stuff. :lol:

 

I am getting this for the Alan Lee illustrations.

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YEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :w00t::w00t::w00t::w00t::w00t::w00t::w00t::w00t::w00t::w00t::w00t::w00t:

 

Apologies for being neither more eloquent nor erudite, but reading this almost made me fall out of my chair. That Christopher Tolkien would manage to get this out before, well, he can't do it himself anymore, is close to being a miracle. I am aware of the fragmented and/or unfinished state of many of the parts that make up the tale of Gondolin, but even so, seeing this getting a release is just marvelous.

 

Christopher Tolkien has done right by his father is so many years and over so many years. He ought to be made a Saint. :)

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Just in time for the Amazon tie-in TV show. Christopher Tolkien has obviously lifted straight from their original scripts to plug the gaps in his father's unfinished work.

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I've said it before, but I really hope Amazon steers out of the first age and make their Television series' about the early third age.

 

The Great Tales lend themselves to the big screen. Something like The Fall of Gondolin would make for one hell of a film!

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On 4/9/2018 at 11:34 AM, Gollum Cat said:

This reminds me - what's a recommended reading order for Tolkien's corpus? I've only read The Hobbit and LOTR, but I'd eventually love to make my way through everything published by him and/or Christopher (including HOME).

 

The traditional list that you’d see in the front matter of a Tolkien book looks something like this (dates added by me):

 

Works by J.R.R. Tolkien

 

1937. The Hobbit
1949. Farmer Giles of Ham
1954-1955. The Lord of the Rings
1962. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil
1964. Tree and Leaf
1967. The Road Goes Ever On (with Donald Swann)
1967. Smith of Wootton Major

 

Works published posthumously

 

1975. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo
1976. The Father Christmas Letters
1977. The Silmarillion
1979. Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien
1980. Unfinished Tales
1981. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
1982. Finn and Hengest
1982. Mr Bliss
1983. The Monsters and the Critics & Other Essays
1983-1996. The History of Middle-earth
1998. Roverandom

2007. The Children of Húrin

 

There have been more releases in the past decade (the “scraping the bottom of the barrel” series), but, let’s leave those aside for now, and get you up to speed. Having read The Hobbit and LOTR, you should certainly read all the rest of the non-posthumous stories at your leisure. Your plan of attack for the main Middle-earth works should be:

  1. The Silmarillion The Children of Húrin
  2. Unfinished Tales
  3. The History of Middle-earth

I would be happy to explain why I suggest this order, but right now let me just state that the first two volumes of The History of Middle-earth make up The Book of Lost Tales, which IMO is Tolkien’s other masterpiece (other than LOTR). Almost all Tolkien books out there are rewrites of BOLT, or mine BOLT, or are straight reprints of material from BOLT. But none of them quite capture the magic of BOLT. Just read it, and ignore the footnotes, and forget everything you know, because it is a genius work on its own plane and not a LOTR tie-in.

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On 11.4.2018 at 11:45 PM, Pellaeon said:

I would be happy to explain why I suggest this order, but right now let me just state that the first two volumes of The History of Middle-earth make up The Book of Lost Tales, which IMO is Tolkien’s other masterpiece (other than LOTR). Almost all Tolkien books out there are rewrites of BOLT, or mine BOLT, or are straight reprints of material from BOLT. But none of them quite capture the magic of BOLT. Just read it, and ignore the footnotes, and forget everything you know, because it is a genius work on its own plane and not a LOTR tie-in.

There is definite fairy tale-ness to the whole Book of Lost Tales that disappears as Tolkien reforges his myths over the course of decades but I find that his ideas sublimate and refine in the process to produce something even more beautiful (if not always as original). But there is undeniable magic and charm to the proto-version of what would later become a more Elven and less Fairy secondary world.

 

Which reminds me I should definitely re-read The Book of Lost Tales in the way you suggest, without getting stuck on the copious notes and footnotes and commentary but just as a story. Christopher Tolkien's academic study and preservation of his father's work is invaluable and we as fans of Tolkien are in his debt for his enormous work on the History of Middle-earth series and subsequent editions but it has to be said that sometimes while reading these books I can't always see the story from the footnotes.

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On 4/13/2018 at 1:27 AM, Incanus said:

I find that his ideas sublimate and refine in the process to produce something even more beautiful (if not always as original).

 

I would say there are only rare instances in which material from BOLT was later rewritten in “sublime” versions, and all such texts all anthologized in Unfinished Tales and The Lays of Beleriand (HOME III). (All involving the three Great Tales, though none can be considered complete, unlike the BOLT originals.)

 

All other “sublime” works, that I can think of, are new pieces which are bolted onto the presupposed BOLT mythological framework—Finwë and Míriel, Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, etc. rather than replacing anything from BOLT.

 

In other words, there is no satisfactory shortcut to experiencing the Legendarium which bypasses BOLT.

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Ok, guys, as a new book approaches publication, it seems a good time to ask this question, to wit:

I know that it's an enormous subject, but...based on what is published, is there any information on how to read the - I'll call it the Rings saga, for want of a more accurate term - in chronological order? How does one put the contents of all of the Middle Earth books, into a cohesive whole?

 

 

(edit) I've just read @Pellaeon's entry. Would A HISTORY OF MIDDLE EARTH be a good place to start?

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It depends.

 

Technically, you'll want to read The Silmarillion, followed by The Hobbit, followed by The Lord of the Rings. Everything else - The History of Middle Earth, The Unfinished Tales, the Lost Tales, etc - are elaborations, drafts and alternate versions of the material appearing in one or more of those three works.

 

However, there's a notable change in format between the former and the other two, the Silmarillion being told more as a history-book and less as a character-driven narrative. Ideally, we'd have all three "great tales" (which are at the heart of the Silmarillion), laid out in a character-driven format. But, as it is, only The Children of Hurin meets that criteria.

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The most complete, chronological and cohesive order would be something like this: (not actual examples, it would just be in this ballpark)

Start reading the Silmarillion. On page 35, when the sentence "Then they..." starts, open HoME Volume 4 and start reading chapter 3 without the commentaries. When it finishes, get back to Silmarillion, skipping the shortened version of the story you just read. (...) When Túrin's story starts, skip the Silmarillion chapter and read The Children of Húrin. (...) When you finish the Silmarillion, read the LotR Appendix B, then the Second Age, Palantírs, and Istari portion of Unfinished Tales, then Appendix D, then move on to the Hobbit. After that, read Appendix C, the Quest for Erebor and the relevant portion of the timeline in the Appendices before starting LotR. Insert the removed "Gandalf tells Frodo of the War in the North in Minas Tirith" segment in the appropriate location.

It's kind of a mess, and you just have to put it all together in your head. And more often than not, you even have multiple versions of a story to choose from.

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9 minutes ago, Holko said:

the Quest for Erebor and the relevant portion of the timeline in the Appendices before starting LotR

 

Nope. "The Quest of Erebor" is supposed to be sandwiched somewhere within "The Steward and the King". It's taken from a draft of that episode, and the last part of "Durin's Folk" from Appendix A is but a condensed version of it.:P

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Just now, Holko said:

(not actual examples, it would just be in this ballpark)

 

I don't exactly have the time to keep the chronology of every damn short story in my head. I haven't even read LotR in 2 years, as much as I'd love to.

I specifically wrote that quote in there so I could counter your inevitable nitpicking :P

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Oh sure, I was just trying to show how damn complicated the whole thing is.

 

Ideally, we'd have a book with a fully character-driven version of "Beren and Luthien", including a foreword that summarizes the early parts of the Silmarillion; "The Children of Hurin", combined with the story of "The Wandering of Hurin"; Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin as a character-driven story, with the Voyage of Earendil and War of Wrath as an epilogue; than, a revised version of The Hobbit, than The Lord of the Rings.

 

The second age is still tricky though. Originally, Tolkien didn't concieve three ages: All his early writing encompas what we now know as "The First Age", ending in the War of Wrath (which, at some point, was supposed to be one and the same as the Dagor Dagorath). The geography of the parts of Middle Earth that we know from The Lord of the Rings wasn't even in his mind: Beleriand was effectivelly all of Middle Earth at the time.

 

When he started writing The Hobbit, he was originally telling it against a backdrop that was a mish-mash of elements from The Silmarillion (The Necromancer, Mirkwood, the Elvenking, even Beorn) and the geography of the real world, but as he was writing it he was drawn more and more into pulling from his early writing. Once he wrote The Lord of the Rings as a sequel, he decided to give the world of these two novels a more clear definition within his fictional world, andhit upon the idea of staging them in the "Third Age", with the events of his early stories now said to take place in "The First Age".

 

As a result, however, the events of the Second Age remained little more than filler, and are therefore the most thinly drawn and inconsistent of the whole legendarium.

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As I see it, The Lord of the Rings actually incorporates three separate ‘genres’ of Tolkien’s previous works:

http://philipsokolov.com/images/history.jpg

The Hobbit definitely draws heavily on the Silmarillion tradition, especially the ‘Beren and Lúthien’ material and the ‘Nauglafring’ story, to which you can almost say it is a sequel (there’s a hoard with a necklace and a jewel; dwarves and elves-in-a-cave-in-a-forest are fighting over it), but these connections, while substantial, are left vague, because Tolkien, while naturally mining his own material, didn’t mean for The Hobbit to actually be a part of the same mythology/canon. LOTR, of course, changed that, drawing directly on both and justifying the coexistence of both (with two Ages intervening).

 

But the Second Age doesn’t come out of nowhere. There was a third and separate cycle devoted to a time travel epic known originally as The Lost Road. Again, this draws on the Silmarillion mythology without exactly justifying its coexistence with it. If you have read C.S. Lewis’s space travel trilogy, you may be aware that it arose out Tolkien and Lewis agreeing to tackle the time travel and space travel genres, respectively. Hence the various references to ‘Numinor’ in Lewis’s trilogy (and, incidentally, there is also a connection in The Magician’s Nephew, in which Atlantis is mentioned), and why Lewis’s hero is named Elwin (Ransom), a reference to Tolkien’s central character Ælfwine (from The Book of Lost Tales; also Alboin from The Lost Road and Alwin Lowdham from The Notion Club Papers). Also, in the definitive version of Tolkien’s time travel epic, The Notion Club Papers (published in Sauron Defeated), which I highly recommend, there are various references back to Lewis’s series. So, long story short, check out Sauron Defeated to see how this all plays out. Fascinating stuff in its own right. And needless to say it’s where LOTR ultimately got its Dúnedain kingdoms and much of its Second Age lore. Other great Second Age stories are found in Unfinished Tales and in The Peoples of Middle-earth (‘Tal-elmar’).

 

 

4 hours ago, Richard said:

I know that it's an enormous subject, but...based on what is published, is there any information on how to read the - I'll call it the Rings saga, for want of a more accurate term - in chronological order? How does one put the contents of all of the Middle Earth books, into a cohesive whole?

 

On re-reads I do cobble together a ‘whole’ First Age. Although it is not exactly cohesive, it is very expansive and certainly enjoyable.

 

LOST TALES
“Ælfwine of England” from vol. II (pp. 312-22)
The Book of Lost Tales, vol. I (complete)
“The Tale of Tinúviel” from vol. II

 

LATER WRITINGS
“The Lay of Leithian” from vol. III
The Children of Húrin (chs. 1-12 plus cut passages from UT)
“Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin” from UT
The Children of Húrin (ch. 13 through p. 257)
“The Wanderings of Húrin” from vol. XI

 

BACK TO LOST TALES
“The Nauglafring” from vol. II (pp. 112-6; 221-42)
“The Fall of Gondolin” from vol. II (starting from Tuor’s arrival)

 


And frequently-read First Age materials outside the main stream include:

 

“The Awaking of the Quendi” from XI (pp. 420-3)
“Finwë and Miriel” from X
“Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth” from X
“The Lay of the Children of Húrin” from III

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Can't wait for 2022 when Peoples of Middle-Earth is finally set to be published, making us the second country after Spain to translate the whole package!

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1 hour ago, Pellaeon said:

you may be aware that it arose out Tolkien and Lewis agreeing to tackle the time travel and space travel genres, respectively.

 

Indeed.

 

Even the quest of the Ring traverses time just as much as it does miles. It starts in an early-modern-period English farming community (The Shire), and goes back to the more Medieval Bree, to the Norse world of the Dark Ages in Rohan, and ultimately to Gondor, which is lifted straight out of classical antiquity, and some of the nearby cultures such as the Druedain, the Orcs and even the Easterlings evoke even older, prehistoric cultures.

 

That, of course, isn't to say that Tolkien intended to directly parallel any of those locations and cultures with these real-world cultures and periods. Its more of a kind of shorthand. Although, if you ask Lindsay Ellis, she'd call it "racial coding", because appearantly we need to be politically-correct in our approach to 14-century Mongols...

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Fascinating observation! Oh, well, considering he used Anglo-Saxon for the language of the Eorlingas, I’d say the parallel was intentional, at least on one level. And Minas Tirith could stand in for Númenor itself. Yes, it very nearly mirrors the journey he intended for the hero of The Lost Road.

 

By the way, what do you mean “even Beorn”? He is one element for which I find no Silmarillion antecedent.

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He doesn't have an obvious parallel like the Elvenking or Mirkwood, but he is based, I believe, on Huan (who in earlier versions of the Tale of Tinuviel doesn't meet his end) and on early itirations of Beren's character (note the similarity of the names), where he and his people are said to have been great friends of the hounds and great hunters.

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Perhaps someday, somebody will set The Children of Húrin, Beren and Luthien and The Fall of Gondolin to music...? Quite the canvas there for some great music...

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Both Lay of Leithian and the Children of Hurin in poem form are indeed quite magnificent. I just wish Tolkien had finished both of them.

9 hours ago, Chen G. said:

The Children of Hurin especially just has this operatic quality. You can just imagine the slaying of Glaurung put to music.

It does and has roots deep in the European and Scandinavian (and Finnish!) myths and legends, which to my mind makes it such a mythically resonant subject matter, a tragedy of the highest order.

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40 minutes ago, Incanus said:

Both Lay of Leithian and the Children of Hurin in poem form are indeed quite magnificent. I just wish Tolkien had finished both of them.

 

But he did leave the Lay of The Children of Hurin in a much more complete form, and in one that is far more consistent with the prose version compared to the Lay of Leithian, which again proves to me that the former was his favorite story out of the two, and certainly the one he was most proud of.

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1 hour ago, Chen G. said:

 

But he did leave the Lay of The Children of Hurin in a much more complete form, and in one that is far more consistent with the prose version compared to the Lay of Leithian, which again proves to me that the former was his favorite story out of the two, and certainly the one he was most proud of.

Although he identified himself more strongly with the story of Beren and Lúthien personally.

 

Personally I think the alliterative verse of the Children of Húrin is a more powerful of the two because of its meter which gives the epic a beautiful archaic atmosphere.

 

 

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On 4/16/2018 at 10:20 AM, Holko said:

The most complete, chronological and cohesive order would be something like this: (not actual examples, it would just be in this ballpark)

Start reading the Silmarillion. On page 35, when the sentence "Then they..." starts, open HoME Volume 4 and start reading chapter 3 without the commentaries. When it finishes, get back to Silmarillion, skipping the shortened version of the story you just read. (...) When Túrin's story starts, skip the Silmarillion chapter and read The Children of Húrin. (...) When you finish the Silmarillion, read the LotR Appendix B, then the Second Age, Palantírs, and Istari portion of Unfinished Tales, then Appendix D, then move on to the Hobbit. After that, read Appendix C, the Quest for Erebor and the relevant portion of the timeline in the Appendices before starting LotR. Insert the removed "Gandalf tells Frodo of the War in the North in Minas Tirith" segment in the appropriate location.

It's kind of a mess, and you just have to put it all together in your head. And more often than not, you even have multiple versions of a story to choose from.

What about the unused  epilogue?

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I’m afraid he abandoned both long poems due to negative reader feedback. And I’m afraid audiences still shy from poetry. I was unhappy that the Beren and Lúthien standalone book turned out to consist mainly of the early prose ‘Tale of Tinúviel’ (which I like, but, it is emphatically not the definitive form of the story), though I understand. I myself prefer to read the prose and the poetic versions back-to-back. Ah well, we do have The Lays of Beleriand, so, nothing is lost. I could wish for a deluxe version, without editorial commentary (other than C.S. Lewis’s excellent critique!), someday. I will add that even Tolkien’s prose must to be read aloud to be properly appreciated, and that is something just not done today. A lot of the ‘hiking through nature’ bits which may seem somewhat dull and skippable (eg., ‘A Short Rest’ in The Hobbit, ‘The Ring Goes South’ in The Lord of the Rings, and yes, yes, yes the entirety of the masterpiece ‘Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin’) ARE indeed very much the point!

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When Tolkien focuses on nature or descriptions of the geography, weather, fauna and flora...these are among my favourite parts of his stories! So evocative.

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1 hour ago, Kühni said:

When Tolkien focuses on nature or descriptions of the geography, weather, fauna and flora...these are among my favourite parts of his stories! So evocative.

 

Yeah, if you’re reading Tolkien and can’t appreciate those bits I’d wonder why you’re reading it at all. 

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On 4/16/2018 at 2:23 PM, Richard said:

Ok, guys, as a new book approaches publication, it seems a good time to ask this question, to wit:

I know that it's an enormous subject, but...based on what is published, is there any information on how to read the - I'll call it the Rings saga, for want of a more accurate term - in chronological order? How does one put the contents of all of the Middle Earth books, into a cohesive whole?

 

 

(edit) I've just read @Pellaeon's entry. Would A HISTORY OF MIDDLE EARTH be a good place to start?

 

@Ricard, have you read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings?

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If you want to go by the strictly narrative route, than The Silmarillion.

 

If you want something character-driven like those two pieces, than undeniably The Children of Hurin is the way to go.

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