What do You think about Unfinished Tales Of Númenor And Middle-Earth (2000)?
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 LotR. A really amazing work and enjoyable read if you're a die-hard Tolkien fan.
—Terry
J.R.R. Tolkien's Unfinished Tales is a terrific book for diehard Tolkien fans, in particular, fans of The Lord of the Rings who have not yet read The Silmarillion. Ever wondered what were the exact events that caused Isildur to lose the One Ring? Or the origins of Wizards? Or what Middle-Earth was like during its First Age? Unfinished Tales helps to shed light on the complex creation of Middle-Earth and the many tales and legends that relate the events in its long and largely tumultuous history.I found this book to be very interesting with a number of wonderful never before told tales from Tolkien's furiously hoarded safe box of writings such as "Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin", "The Disaster of The Gladden Fields" and my personal favorite "Aldarion and Erendis: The Mariner's Wife". Even in their sometimes incomplete state, the archaic nature of the tales contained in this book add to the mystique that Tolkien discovered a trove of ancient manuscripts in some dark and remote cave recounting a lost and forgotten age of our world rather than merely conjuring it up out of his vast and unfettered imagination.My only complaint about Unfinished Tales is that like the other history of Middle-Earth books, Tolkien's son and literary executor Christopher is too enamored of trivial events in his father's creation of Middle-Earth and seems too driven to point out every single nuance (and sometimes meaningless facts) about the many versions of the tales his father wrote before they came to their final, but incomplete forms. This makes for some rather unnecessarily confusing, if not, at times, dull reading.Even so, I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about how Tolkien created the world behind The Lord of the Rings and the many wondrous and previously unpublished tales that we could only guess had existed.
—Kevis Hendrickson
What makes the Tolkien legendarium so remarkable is that not only is it of the highest quality, there is also a basically inexhaustible quantity of it, in increasing degrees of depth and detail to suit any reader's appetite. For those who only want a quick and light peek into the Tolkien universe, The Hobbit will suffice. For those who desire the full epic fantasy novel experience (indeed, the standard by which all epic fantasy literature is judged), there's The Lord of the Rings. And at that point, most readers will have had their fill and will move on to other things.But for those like myself who, upon finishing LotR, find themselves demanding more, the fantastic news is that the Hobbit + LotR constitute merely a fraction of Tolkien's output. Do you want to know the epic history of the earlier ages of Middle-Earth that preceded and shaped the late Third Age in which the Hobbit and LotR take place? Then the Silmarillion is a must-read. And those who are STILL not sated by the 400 pages of the Silmarillion's "strictly for the hardcore"-grade content can continue on to the Unfinished Tales, in which Tolkien's son Christopher collects and synthesizes a series of Tolkien's miscellaneous writings on individual details of character and history within the legendarium, often on topics that received only a passing mention at best in Tolkien's published works. What was the geography of the lost island of Numenor like? How did the Three Rings of the Elves avoid falling under Sauron's domination, unlike the other Rings of Power? What were the historical details of King Theoden's obligation to send the Riders of Rohan to the aid of Gondor when Sauron attacked Minas Tirith? Where did Gandalf and Saruman come from, and who (or what) were the "wizards" really? Answers to all these questions and more are described in great detail herein.I dock this book one star because there is no narrative (or even thematic, really) coherence to the contents-- they are merely a mixed bag of odds and ends from throughout the legendarium-- and also because the longest item in the book, Narn i Hîn Húrin (The Tale of the Children of Húrin), has been subsequently published as a standalone book. (In fact, the version published here isn't even the complete Tale, just certain segments of it.) However, for anyone like myself who can't get enough Tolkien under any circumstances, this is still a must-read.
—Ulysses
