???????????Unfinished tales

Ive only read untill Tour have met Voronme, but until there, is excitement and thrilled..

This is the first work that showed us how Tolkien's obsessive perfectionism was a double-edged sword. On the one hand it gave us the wonderfully deep world and implied distances of The Lord of the Rings; and on the other hand it left us with a jumble of tales in various states of revision and development that had to be compiled by Tolkien's son Christopher into some form as The Silmarillion and enjoyed this, it was just so great to learn more about both old and new characters!!

This book is extensive in detail, with a myriad of names and places to try and remember and make sense of, and at the same time apply it to several time lines and plots one should already know from the Lord of the Rings series. This is indeed heavy reading and text-book like at times and really should only be undertook by someone who is already familiar with Middle Earth. Many answers are solved and some mysteries revealed. I particularly enjoyed learning about the kingdom of Numenor and the origins of the five wizards, and Gandalf's endeavors in the decades leading up to the war of the ring. There is also captivating new characters and stories from the first two ages that you will enjoy. There is a lot to absorb in this book, but it's well worth it in my opinion.

This is the first work that showed us how Tolkien's obsessive perfectionism was a double-edged sword. On the one hand it gave us the wonderfully deep world and implied distances of The Lord of the Rings; and on the other hand it left us with a jumble of tales in various states of revision and development that had to be compiled by Tolkien's son Christopher into some form as The Silmarillion...a jumble of tales that, if they had been finished, would have given us a truly staggering body of work. Just reading the fragment that makes up the entirety of "Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin" makes me weep for what might have been. Given the chance to expand even half of the partial tales from _The Silmarillion_ into something equating the full treatment of the LotR would have been a wonder indeed.

Even given the incomplete nature of the works herein, the reader is greatly repaid the effort of reading them even though many tantalizing questions are left unanswered. We get perhaps the only significant view of the land of Numenor in the Second Age; intriguing glimpses into the nature of the Istari, the Woodwoses, and the Palantiri and expansions on the background of the Third Age and the events that led up to both The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings.