If you want to learn more about J.R.R Tolkien's Middle-Earth then this book and its companion (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two) are for you. This isn't so much a story per se as Tolkien's notes and drafts.

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Excellent book on the history of Middle Earth. A showing of Tolkien's genius in the creation of this world and it's epic heroes.

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The Book of Lost Tales stands at the beginning of the entire concepton of Middle-earth and Valinor, for the Tales were the first form of the myths and legends that came to be called The Silmarillion.

By the author of Lord of the Rings

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The first major work of J.R.R. Tolkien, the history of middle-earth.

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Lost Tales (Book 1) is a highly interesting and valuable book in a variety of ways. It affords us an almost overtheshoulder view into the evolving creative process and genious of J.R.R. Tolkien in a new exciting aspect not seen before. In addition, it gives us much information and rich detail often highly illuminating that was later to be greatly compressed or passed over in the published the Silmarillion. Further, it sheds much new light on the way in which Tollkien's mythology was inteded in its orighion conception as a mythology for England. The Basis for which was easily seen in earlier published writings. Two other aspects are additionaly seen.. There are new linguistic information not known before. The superb, sensitive and extremely helpful commentary and editing done by Christopher Tolkien makes all this possible.

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Definitely for the die hard Tolkien fan. May not be as appealing to the average reader.

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THE BOOK OF LOST TALES, I, stands at the beginning of the entire conception of Middle-earth and Valinor, for the TALES were the first form of the myths and legends that came to be called THE SILMARILLION.
Embedded in English legend and English association, they are set in the narrative frame of a great westward voyage over the Ocean by a mariner named Eriol (or Aelfwine) to Tol Eressea, the Lonely Isle, where Elves dwelt; from them he learned their true history, the LOST TALES OF ELFINESSE. In the TALES are found the earliest accounts and original ideas of Gods and Elves, Dwarves, Balrogs, and Orcs; of the Simmarils and the Two Trees of Valinor; of Nargothrond and Gondolin; of the geography and cosmology of the invented world.

In these LOST TALES we have the scholar joyously gambolling in the thickets of his imagination... a Commentary and Notes greatly enrich the quest. - THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

Affords us an almost over-the-shoulder view into the evolving creative process and genius of J.R.R. Tolkien in a new, exciting aspect... The superb, sensitive and extremely helpful commentary and editing done by Christopher Tolkien makes all this possible. - MYTHLORE

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