Complete Guide to Middle-Earth From the Hobbit Through the Lord of the Rings and Beyond

With the appearance of The Silmarillion, the publication of J. R. R. Tolkien's mythopoesis is virtually complete. The reader can now appreciate the full scope and significance of the history of Aman and Middle-earth, the central stages in the great drama of the Creation of Eae. One can trace in detail the Light of Aman from the Two Trees on Ezellohar to the renewing power of the Phial of Galadriel in the stinking darkness of Shelob's Lair. The terror felt there by Sam Gamgee is better understood after reading of the Unlight of Ungoliant, and Boromir's desire for the Ring can be seen as a wisp of the Shadow of Melkor, who lusted after Light but created only Darkness. Not only do the great conflicts between East and West--from the First War and the Battle of the Powers to the Battle of Fornost and the War of the Ring-- reveal the nature of good and evil and the immeasurable compassion of Iluvatar, but also, the identity of the forces that intervene to give victory to the good suggests the progressive freeing of Man from the influence of both Valar and demons to work out his own destiny, known to Iluvatar alone. Writing this revised edition of my Guide to Middle-earth has enhanced my awareness of these correspondences, designs which are surely central to the joy of Faerie and which give Professor Tolkien's work its marvelous and profound coherence. But it has also made me aware of the difference between the conception and the realization of this cycle of myth and romance, between the 'visionary scene' and its 'frame,' 1 between the Vision and the Text. The 'seamless web of Story' 2 is indeed endless and without blemish, but books--and lives--alas, are not. In the first edition of the Guide, I used any information available to me that I believed came from Professor Tolkien and had been transmitted accurately; I hoped that these details would ultimately appear in print. But now--faced with a plethora of revised texts, calendars, letters, illustrations, interviews, anecdotes, and reports of conversations, some containing contradictory information--I have come to believe that inconsistencies, sometimes deliberately maintained by Professor Tolkien, occur where the details of the Vision were not clear to him, where he was stymied by a single leaf on the Tree, not sure of 'its shape, and its sheen, and the glistening of dewdrops on its edge,' 3 not yet ready to fix it in the Text. Yet these inconsistencies, which can bulk large in an alphabetic treatment of Faerie, should not be allowed to detract from the general bloom of this lushly foliated Tree. So this revised Guide is limited to the Text, to published works by Professor Tolkien in the latest editions available to American readers. The basic text for The Lord of the Rings is again the Ballantine paperback edition, with emendations from the revised Houghton Mifflin hardback edition; Appendix C contains a concordance between the two editions. British editions contain several further emendations, which I have not taken into account; of those I have heard of or seen, the most significant is the change of d to dh in Galadrim and Caras Galadon, which resolves the confusion (encouraged, it seems, by the Elves themselves, as Christopher Tolkien's comment in The Silmarillion on Galadhriel suggests) between Sindarin galad 'light' and galadh 'tree.' The three exceptions to this rule of Text are sources which seem particularly trustworthy: the Pauline Baynes map of Middle-earth displays a number of place-names evidently given her by Professor Tolkien; Clyde Kilby's intimate Tolkien and the Silmarillion contains intriguing hints of the End; so much of the information contained in Professor Tolkien's letters to anFoster, Robert Hill is the author of 'Complete Guide to Middle-Earth From the Hobbit Through the Lord of the Rings and Beyond' with ISBN 9780345449764 and ISBN 0345449762.