Synopses & Reviews
THE BOOK OF LOST TALES, I, stands at the beginning of the entire conception of Middle-earth and Valinor. Here is the whole, glorious history of Middle-earth that J.R.R. Tolkien brought to mythic and dramatic life with his classic fantasy novels of the Ring Cycle.
Review
"Christopher Tolkien's meticulous and loving editing of his father's notebooks is merited. . . . As writing, it is perhaps on the level of Macaulay's Horatius, which is not the highest praise, but still praise. As imagination, it is on an extraordinarily higher level than Macaulay achieved, because all the network of allusion and emotion, for which Macaulay could rely on Virgil, Livy and the actualities of Rome and Italy, Tolkien created successfully from his own feeling for human experience and human language. It is a feeling like Virgil's (with whom he shared the ambition to create a mythology for his nation), a melancholy and sophisticated feeling which responds to antiquity." The Times Literary Supplement
Synopsis
These are the first two parts of a projected three volume work. The "first one contains {ten of} the original tales of Valinor, while the second . . . presents {five} early versions of the tales surrounding Beren and Luthien,Turin and the dragon, the necklace of the dwarves, and the fall of Gondolin.The third promises the lays of Beleriand." (Libr J) Index.