More stories and explanations about some of the key story arcs in Middle-earth, some before and some during LOTR. ( )

I think I felt that this book wasn't entirely written by Tolkien himself. Sure, his son (?) did an admirable job and I liked reading more stories playing in middle earth, but compared to LotR and the silmarillion and Hobbit, this one falls a little flat. ( )

For fans of Tolkien and his mythology, this is an indispensable work. Unfinished Tales provides incredible details about many aspects of The Lord of the Rings, such as the hunt for the One Ring and how the Ringwraiths got to the Shire. There is also a history of Galadriel and Celeborn, a full account of Tuor’s journey to Gondolin, the history of the Wizards, and the history of the long friendship between Gondor and Rohan, as told in “Cirion and Eorl”. All readers of Tolkien must read this collection if they are going to understand Middle-earth and its history and people.

One can read this book as a companion to The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, or The Hobbit, but it can also be read on its own. There are notes from Christopher Tolkien which explain the progress of each story, and the different versions of them. The only complaint I have is that my edition only provides a general map of Middle-earth, after the breaking of the West. There is no map of Beleriand. But there is a map of Númenor, and it’s a great help as a reference when reading “A Description of the Island of Númenor”. I had a lot of fun reading this again, and I found the stories, which are found almost nowhere else (with the exception of the “Narn I Hîn Húrin”, the history of Turin Turumbar). I would recommend this not only to hard-core readers of Tolkien, but also those who are simply curious about the history of Middle-earth. ( )

I finally read this collection for the much the same reason as I bought it a couple of years before. That seems a little silly, reading it back to myself - surely everyone buys books for the same reason they read them? Let me try to expand on it a little.

In a sense, I grew up reading Tolkien. The Hobbit wasn't quite the first book I read, though it must have been close - it was certainly the first I read almost to destruction. I still have it lying around somewhere; an old, tattered paperback, half its yellowed pages now come unglued from the spine. The Lord of the Rings followed soon after - in fact, I probably listened to that one first: I can just about still remember sitting, aged five or six, in a quiet library somewhere listening to the 1981 BBC Radio dramatisation. But actually reading the book can't have come much later, and further readings followed soon after. A few more years after that I got my hands on a copy of The Silmarillion, one of the Ted Nasmith illustrated editions. I still have a copy of that, too, and one in rather better condition than my old Hobbit paperbacks, despite multiple readings of this, too.

It would be difficult, if not impossible, for me to honestly assess just how much of an impact Tolkien has had on my reading habits. For a start, the fact I have reading habits at all owes a lot to him. I read voraciously as a child, and while there was plenty I read that was considered 'better' than Tolkien, and plenty that I enjoyed more at the time, it always seemed to be The Lord of the Rings that I came back to. The majority of fiction I read even to this day tends towards the fantasy genre, and this too is something I suspect Tolkien is responsible for.

So it was something of a shock to realise, sometime in my teenage years, that I didn't actually much like the stuff Tolkien had written.

In rereads, I found myself skipping more and more of The Lord of the Rings; the quest to destroy the ring certainly featured some impressive set-pieces - particularly in the second half of Fellowship - but it also contained a great deal of dullness, with lengthy, rambling poetry and references to the world's history substituting for real characterisation and any effort to make the villains credible or motivated. Sam and Frodo felt almost real, but few of the other characters did ... Tolkien's world was deep, yes, but it was also empty. My increasing awareness of the political subtext didn't help, of course: if the heroes could be identified by their opposition to industrialisation and their desire to restore power to the monarchy, why was I so convinced that Prince Charles was a buffoon? Okay, that's rather facetious, but ... the fact that 'good' and 'evil' could, in Tolkien's world, be so easily broken down along racial lines bothered me, as did the lack of any interest in attempting to reform evil (except, arguably, in the case of Gollum, though that was certainly presented more as an act of faith that is rewarded by a deus ex machina than as an act of trust that is rewarded by genuine reform).

And while I've never quite approached the position of, say, Michael Moorcock, I was - and am - increasingly convinced that Tolkien's influence on the genre was often less than a positive one. Unable or unwilling to imitate Tolkien's better qualities, successive fantasy writers have all too often simply aped his worse ones. It's no coincidence, surely, that despite the legion of Tolkien imitators the only two currently active writers of epic fantasy I can take at all seriously (George R R Martin and the relatively unknown R Scott Bakker) are influenced more by, respectively, the historical fiction of Sharon Kay Penman and the science fiction of Frank Herbert.

Why then the desire to buy Unfinished Tales? Well ... the problem is, I'm something of a completist. I don't like leaving things half-done - hearing a story or reading a fictional history, even one I can find plenty to criticise about, leaves me with an urge to find out more. In some sense, I felt, reading this book was just the natural outcome of having read the Silmarillion. (This same urge later led to me owning a complete set of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, despite my belief that only 'Fellowship' really works properly of the three.) More rationally, perhaps, I could point to the fact that I had, after all, enjoyed the collected stories of the Silmarillion more than the story of The Lord of the Rings; indeed while I had problems with Tolkien as a story-teller, I was still impressed with his efforts in developing his world's mythology and history.

Of course, making the decision to buy the book was not the same as making the time to read it. So for many months it sat on a shelf, all but unopened. It was the growing realisation that I owned many such books - unstarted as much as they were unfinished - that triggered another expression of that urge to completism. And so at the start of this year I resolved to make a sustained drive to systematically go through all the books I'd bought over the years and not properly read. It was only a matter of time before this book was swept up in that effort.

I actually enjoyed reading the Unfinished Tales rather more than I expected to.

The 'Narn i Hîn Húrin' is the longest single work included in the collection - indeed, given its appearance in various different forms in both the Silmarillion and the recent independent Children of Hurin, it's clearly of central importance to Tolkien's universe (only the story of the Hobbit has arguably appeared in more versions). Fittingly, it's also the strongest work here, though it is frustratingly incomplete, with large portions of the narrative simply missing (the interested reader is here referred to the more summarised version in the Silmarillion, though of course now the Children of Hurin would likely be a better option).

The other First Age story included here - 'Of Tuor And His Coming To Gondolin' - left me rather underwhelmed, though perhaps a more recent reread of the Silmarilion would have helped here. Aldarion and Erendis also failed to capture my interest - which perhaps can be attributed to the fact that, as it's so little discussed in the Silmarillion, I had little knowledge of, or interest in, the events of the Second Age. That said, I found "The History of Galadriel and Celeborn" fascinating, as much for the way it described the evolution of Tolkien's conception of the story (and of the wider Middle-Earth) as for anything else. And while this and the other stories of the Second Age can hardly be said to make Sauron three-dimensional, they did at least provide some sense of his actually having a history in the world beyond lurking in the east and plotting undefined evil.

Of the Third Age stories, "The Quest for Erebor" - in effect, The Hobbit from the point of view of Gandalf - was very well done; in fact, among the stories in this section only that of Cirion and Eorl seemed to drag at times. The chance to find out 'what happened' to minor characters from the Hobbit during the events of the war against Mordor, or read an explanation of why Gandalf and Saruman are, in effect, the only wizards to take part in that war, was exactly why I had purchased the book, and as such very welcome. I was impressed too with the evidence of how much work Christopher Tolkien had put into this compilation (though I'll admit I didn't read all the many endnotes).

So, in all, this was a pleasant surprise, even if I have no plan to reread this book any time soon. And hopefully I'll continue to avoid the urge to collect the History of Middle-Earth for a while yet ...

By no means an easy read, the Unifished Tales are, I suspect, best read immediately following the Silmarillion. Since I hadn't done this, I had difficulty keeping track of where in time and space things were going on, and difficulty relating them back to the parts of the Tolkien's world with which I was already familiar. Definitely worthwhile, but not to be taken on lightly. ( )