The Book of Lost Tales 1

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Most exciting - Rated
This book is simply a marvel! It tells you all about the Valar, the Valinor and the coming of the Eldar. You should buy it. TOLKIEN FANS MUST BUY THIS BOOK IF THEY TRULY LOVE MIDDLE EARTH.

Tales change and develop - Rated
In real mythologies the tales change and develop over time: names, times and places change with the constant retelling and embellishing by the story-tellers. In real mythologies, accounts often become fragmented and there may be several differing accounts of a single event. It's the same with the mythology of Middle Earth and Valinor. The way Tolkien develops the stories over the course of his life-time is analogous to the way real heroic events become legend and the legends become myths and all sorts of changes reshape them. Real life examples would be 1) the story of Beowulf who may have been a real but mortal hero of his people, but in the telling and retelling of the tale over the centuries, he was able to swim for 2 weeks in the freezing seas of Northern Europe wearing mail and he was able to do battle under water; 2) the Arthurian legends where the hero has been claimed to have lived and had his court at a dozen or more locations in Britain; 3) the Merlin legends where Merlin may or may not have been associated with Arthur 4) The Robin Hood legends where again, Robin has been claimed to have been based at various locations. And so on.

Lost Tales Part 1 is a collection of accounts of the origins of the world of Middle Earth and Valinor, concentrating mainly on the gods and the elves. The stories overlap those in Silmarillion but differ in many instances. Names, characters and places had been changed by the time Tolkien finalised the material that went into The Silmarillion. It's fascinating to see the character and story development with notes and commentary from Christopher Tolkien drawing attention to the changes and stating (where the reasons were known to him) and providing convincing speculations (where specific information was not known) why these changes were made.

This book will be appreciated by the person who enjoyed reading Lord of the Rings but was left wanting to know more, and partially satisfied their curiosity by reading Silmarillion, but was still left wanting to know more ....

Self obsessed but interesting book - Rated
This book continues straight on from the first volume of early versions of the Silmarillion stories.

While the first volume was mostly concerned with the gods of Valinor, here the emphasis is on a more human scale with tales of Turamber, the fall of Gondolin etc… Unfortunately this book is if anything even more inaccessible than its predecessor, due to the increasingly fractured nature of the surviving material (the last two of which consist of little more than fragments) and the editors increasing obsession with the minutiae of these drafts. There really is no need to be informed of every single deviation between drafts unless it is a change of substance – (for example, what benefit is it for us to know that the phrase “ man of greater stature” was originally “a man of great size”?) – and this slows the books reading down to a crawl.

Despite this there is still some very illuminating material here that was greatly compressed in the Silmarillion, so despite the stilted tone this is still worth wading through.

Lords of the Rings pre-histrory and context explained - Rated
All the Christopher Tolkien books are of value to the reader facinated by The Hobbit and LOTR and wanting to know more about what JRR Tolkein wrote on the subject. He wrote a great deal (and abandoned rather than published much of it) as he tried to link across Middle Earth and its histories into a real European myth.
In this book the reader is guided through this difficult process so that you will be able to get some insight into how "the whole" may once have meant to have hung together; English and European prehistory/mythology, The Silmarillion and the races decribed in the Tolkien books. Other books in this excellent series add more pieces to this virtual jigsaw.

A challenging but well worth the time read - Rated
This book is really great. It has some stories which don't appear in the sillmarillion yet are really interesting if you have read the silmarillion. You have to concentrate quite hard to understand it all but it is worth it, some of the stories are fantastic. I would recommend this to anyone who has read the silmarillion and wants get deeper into the tolkien mythology. Christopher Tolkien does a superb job of making it all understandable, by linking the stories and refering to the silmarillion.