History of Middle-earth

The articles here offer a wide range of approaches to medieval warfare. They include traditional studies of strategy (on Baybars) and the logistics of Edward II's wars, as well as cultural history (an examination of chivalry in Guy of Warwick) intellectual history (a broad analysis of strategic theory in the Middle Ages), and social history (on knightly training in arms). The Hundred Years War is studied using cutting-edge methodology (data-driven...

This is the fourth volume of The History of Middle-earth, edited by Christopher Tolkien, the first two comprising The Book of Lost Tales Parts One and Two, and the third The Lays of Beleriand. It has been given the title The Shaping of Middle-earth because the writings it includes display a great advance in the chronological and geographical structure of the legends of Middle-earth and Valinor. The hitherto wholly unknown "Ambarkanta," or Shape of...

In this sixth volume of The History of Middle earth the story reaches The Lord of the Rings. In The Return of the Shadow (an abandoned title for the first volume) Christopher Tolkien describes, with full citation of the earliest notes, outline plans, and narrative drafts, the intricate evolution of The Fellowship of the Ring and the gradual emergence of the conceptions that transformed what J.R.R. Tolkien for long believed would be a far shorter book,...

In The War of the Ring Christopher Tolkien takes up the story of the writing of The Lord of the Rings with the Battle of Helm's Deep and the drowning of Isengard by the Ents. This is followed by an account of how Frodo, Sam and Gollum were finally brought to the Pass of Kirith Ungol, at which point J.R.R. Tolkien wrote at the time: 'I have got the hero into such a fix that not even an author will be able to extricate him without labour and difficulty'....

Throughout this vast and intricate mythology, says Publishers Weekly, "one marvels anew at the depth, breadth, and persistence of J.R.R. Tolkien's labor. No one sympathetic to his aims, the invention of a secondary universe, will want to miss this chance to be present at the creation." In this capstone to that creation, we find the chronology of Middle-earth's later Ages, the Hobbit genealogies, and the Western language or Common Speech. These early...