This is one volume that I am glad to have read. It has stories going all the way the first age all the way through to the third age where in the Lord of the Rings occurs. During the first age the reader is treated to an account of how Tuor found the city of Gondolin after having escaped Morgoth;s slave camp. Led by Ulmo , the sea God and elves Tuor is charged with delivering a message. But does Thingol the King of Gondolin heed that message. The second story is the tragic tale of Turin son of Hurin. Hurin a grat warrior is captured by Morgoth and forced to watch the down fall of his children through a crystal ball. Some of you maybe familiar with the tale of “children of Hurin” Well this is another version of the story.The second age is about the Island of Numenor. Gifted to men after the first age for fighting against Morgoth. The island was pentacle shaped with a central mountain in the center used for worshipping Eru Illuvatar. The royalty lived for a very long time but were not immortal like the elves. The land was rich in forestry and things were pretty mellow with people travelling by horse and there were plenty of crops. The tale of “Aldarion and Erendis” tells how Aldarion heir to the throne goes about travelling by ship on long extended voyages to the Middle Earth. The man is in love with the sea. His extended voyages strain relations between him and his family especially with Erendis his wife. Things get to a point where she raised the daughter on her own and the daughter ended up becoming queen. It must be noted that Aldarion helped men and elves against the forces of Sauron. The next chapter tells the list of kings and queens and finally how the shadown of Sauron brought about the downfall of Numenor. Greed and oppression of men in the Middle Earth turned people against N umenor.The second age also has a section about Lady Galadriel. Telling how she left Valinor in anger against Manwe’s permission, she held an endless grudge against Feanor and Noldor for going against the Valar. She travels over the Misty Mountain and with Cereborn they found their kingdom. She refuses Manwe’s invitation to return and only finally returns after Sauron is defeated and the elves go off to Valinor. “The disaster of Gladden Fields tells of how the rings were made and how one man named Isuldur defeats Sauron and steals his ring. He dies in a river and loses the ring. We all know that Gollum finds it. The tale then tales Cirion and Erol. Erol fights with Gondor against Sauron and the wainriders. For this he is given Rohan as a land to rule over as kings and the riders from that realm are called the Rider’s of Rohan .Things sequay with the “Quest of Erebor” This story gives a lot more background the “Hobbit” especially if you are perplexed about the mentioning of the Shadow in the Hobbit movies. I never remembered reading about that in the Hobbit the first time. Aparentally Gandal knew what was up. He chose Bilbo for a reason as he knew his ultimate destiny to hand the ring to Frod. The hunt for the ring tells how the witch king became the leader of the nine riders. But they have no will of their own save for Suron’s. They are used for quickness. When they captured and tortured Gollum after he lost the ring to Bilbo he was tortured and questioned . Fiortunately for the Hobbits Suaron really never heard of Hobbits.The last part of the book tells about the people of Halth, a warrior group of people who have a female warrior queen. Going further it deals with the origin of the wizards, communication stones and other denizens of the Middle Earth. A must read for Tolkien fans.
I had wanted to read History of Middle Earth (HoME), and re-reading the published version of each became a pre-requisite to refresh my memory. So I read The Silmarillion and then decided before HoME, I'd read The Unfinished Tales. I last read this book roughly 20 years ago so re-reading it was essentially a new experience.While HoME is definitely for the dedicated and hardcore fan of Tolkien, Unfinished Tales is a bit different. I felt like Christopher Tolkien's commentary was more along the lines of a historian providing commentary on events based on other source material rather than a literary exploration that I find HoME to be.As a result, a person who is a fan of The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) that wants to learn more about the events that took place and the history behind those events, can pick up Unfinished Tales and learn something more.So I decided for this review to indicate which sections are more for the readers who fall into the fan of LOTR vs. HoME. This book is of no interest to anyone who isn't at least a fan of LOTR;-)The First Age probably won't provide much immediately relevant new information to the LOTR fan, but I would hope they would love the tragic story of Turin (my favorite of all of Tolkien's works).The first sections of the Second Age also may not be of interest, but certainly The History of Galadriel and Celeborn should be.Part Three is focused on the Third Age, the time of LOTR and The Hobbit. The Quest of Erebor and the Hunt for the Ring are probably most informative to the LOTR fan, while the other sections probably more enjoyed by HoME fan.The fourth Part has an intriguing story of the Druedain, but it is probably more for HoME fans than LOTR fans as it is great story-telling, but not highly related to the events of LOTR.The book finishes with an essay and information on the Istari and the Palantiri. Both play significant roles in LOTR and provide a wonderful extension to what we learn in LOTR.All in all, the information contained in Unfinished Tales and its presentation is fantastic and I'd recommend this to any person who read LOTR and at the end wanted to know more.
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
