|
Book Home  Books Information Unfinished Tales
Unfinished Tales
Unfinished Tales (full title Unfinished Tales of Númenor
and Middle-earth) is a collection of stories by J. R. R. Tolkien that
were never completed during his lifetime, but were edited by his son
Christopher Tolkien and published in 1980.
Unlike The Silmarillion, for which the narrative fragments
were modified to connect into a consistent and coherent work, the
Unfinished Tales are presented as Tolkien left them, with little more
than names changed (the author having had a confusing habit of trying
out different names for a character while writing a draft). Thus some
of these are incomplete stories, while others are collections of "factual"
information about Middle-earth. Each tale is followed by a long series
of notes explaining inconsistencies and obscure points.
As with The Silmarillion, Christopher Tolkien edited
and published Unfinished Tales before he had finished his study of
the materials in his father's archive. Despite its shortcomings in
editorial consistency, Unfinished Tales does provide more detailed
information about characters, events and places mentioned only briefly
in The Lord of the Rings. Versions of such tales including the origins
of Gandalf and the Istari (Wizards), the death of Isildur and the
loss of the One Ring in the Gladden Fields, and the founding of the
kingdom of Rohan help expand knowledge about Middle-earth.
Of particular note is the tale of Aldarion and Erendis,
the only known story of Númenor before its fall. A map of Númenor
is also included in the book.
The commercial success of Unfinished Tales demonstrated
that the demand for Tolkien's stories several years after his death
was not only still present, it was growing. Encouraged by the result,
Christopher Tolkien began to embark upon the more ambitious twelve-volume
work entitled The History of Middle-earth which encompasses nearly
the entire corpus of Tolkien's writings about Middle-earth.
|
