Recommended Reading for Tolkien Fans

NOTE: This post is an update to a post I wrote in r/lotr a decade or so ago. A lot has changed since then.

A frequently asked question in this sub-reddit is, "I'm just getting into Tolkien, and wonder what I should read, and in what order?" This post is intended to expand on the recommended reading list in the side bar (and is adapted from a response I posted to just such a question).

Basics:

The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings

First, read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (which is really one novel, published in three volumes). I'd recommend that order, but it doesn't matter that much. Keep in mind that The Hobbit was definitely written for children, and The Lord of the Rings was not. Also, read the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings, especially Appendices A and B.

The Legendarium:

The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales

After you've read the basics, you have a choice: You can read The Children of Húrin or go straight to The Silmarillion. To some extent which you read first depends on how you reacted to the Appendices — if your reaction was, "This is so cool! Where can I get more of this!", jump straight into The Silmarillion; otherwise read The Children of Húrin, which will give you a somewhat easier introduction to the style and substance of Tolkien's other works. Overall they are much darker and denser than the better-known novels. If you enjoy The Children of Húrin, by all means read The Silmarillion. Don't be afraid to skip around in it or take notes. These should be followed by Unfinished Tales. I also recommend reading Tolkien's Letters at this point.

The Children of Húrin, Beren and Luthien, The Fall of Gondolin

These three books are self-contained versions of the three "Great Tales" of the Legendarium. The first is presented as a continuous narrative, as the tale of the unfortunate Turin Turambar was the most complete of these stories. The latter two present all the material on these two tales from the relevant volumes of The History of Middle-earth (see below), put into appropriate order, and are intended to show as far as possible the development of the individual sagas.

The History of Middle-earth

Both the Letters and the Tales show Tolkien's mind at work as well as providing more details about his world. If you like that sort of thing and want more, there is the 12-volume (yes, twelve) History of Middle-earth series, which is a blow-by-blow presentation of the manuscripts Tolkien wrote for his legendarium, including the history of the writing of The Lord of the Rings. Some of us think this is the greatest thing ever, being able to peer over the shoulder of the Creator at work, while for others it is far too reminiscent of college English classes. Your call. There's also The History of The Hobbit, by John Rateliff, which does the same for The Hobbit. On first reading of any of these you may wish to simply read the manuscripts and ignore Christopher Tolkien's commentary. Also, if you decide that The Silmarillion and related matter is not to your taste, you should be aware that Volumes 5 – 8 of The History of Middle-earth cover The Lord of the Rings, and you may very well find it fascinating how Tolkien developed his masterpiece.

Some more detail on what's in The History of Middle-earth:

I. The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1

II. The Book of Lost Tales, Part 2

The Book of Lost Tales was Tolkien's first go at creating his mythology. It is sort of a proto-Silmarillion; all of the tales are retold in other forms in the later works, but here Tolkien is a very young writer feeling his way.

III. The Lays of Beleriand

"The Lay of Leithian" — the tale of Beren and Lúthien, in several variants, and "The Lay of the Children of Húrin", told in rhyming couplets and alliterative verse, respectively. There are also the fragments of some additional alliterative poems.

IV. The Shaping of Middle-earth

V. The Lost Road and Other Writings

These two volumes comprise the early Silmarillion, a more mature version of what originated in The Book of Lost Tales. The first part of Volume V, from which it takes its title, is a history of Númenor. Volume V also contains a significant amount of linguistic information.

VI. The Return of the Shadow

VII. The Treason of Isengard

VIII. The War of the Ring

IX. Sauron Defeated

These four volumes cover the history of the writing of The Lord of the Rings. Volume IX also includes "The Notion Club Papers", which is another attempt to tell the tale of Númenor.

X. Morgoth's Ring

XI. The War of the Jewels

These two cover the later Silmarillion, that is, Tolkien's work on it following the publication of The Lord of the Rings.

XII. The Peoples of Middle-earth

This final volume covers the writing of the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings and also some other miscellaneous writings and unfinished tales.

An index to the complete series was published in paperback only (but the pagination is the same), and it's very valuable. The complete series is also available in a three-volume set, which takes up a lot less shelf space but can be a bit awkward to read as the volumes are large and the paper quite thin. The full series is also available in trade paperback format.

A very complete listing is given at the Mellonath Daeron website.

A closely related work is The Nature of Middle-earth, edited by Carl F. Hostetter, which contains many short essays and excerpts of essays similar to the material in The Peoples of Middle-earth. This volume was undertaken with Christopher Tolkien's encouragement and begun before his passing in early 2020. The material touches on such things as how elves counted, their reproductive habits, how they aged, and many other topics besides.

Scheduled for publication in November 2022 is The Fall of Numenor, edited by Brian Sibley, which is similar to Beren and Luthien and The Fall of Gondolin, in that it will contain the relevant texts about Númenor's rise and fall.

The Languages

It's well known that Tolkien considered his invented languages the primary impetus for his creative writing. If this interests you, you can read Tolkien's Middle-earth linguistic writings, which are being published in the journals Parma Eldalamberon and Vinyar Tengwar. Of the latter, I highly recommend the freely downloadable copy of VT issue 43, which contains Tolkien's Quenya translations of the Paternoster ("Our Father"), the Ave Maria, and the Gloria Patri. All of the back issues of Vinyar Tengwar are now available on Amazon.com; information about ordering can be found on the Vinyar Tengwar website. Many of the issues of Parma Eldalamberon are currently out of print but some are available from the site linked above.

The Shorter Works

Tolkien wrote a lot of other things as well, most unrelated to Middle-earth, and some of them fairly scholarly. I'm going to list these with some brief commentary:

Short fiction

• (1) Mr. Bliss: A children's picture book with a motor car, some cantankerous bears, and a girabbit
• (2) Roverandom: A story about the adventures of a toy dog, written somewhat before The Hobbit
• (3) The Father Christmas Letters/Letters from Father Christmas: Letters Tolkien wrote to his children, profusely illustrated
• (4) Farmer Giles of Ham: featuring a very fine dragon
• (5) Leaf by Niggle: a curiously allegorical story about a painter and a painting he can't seem to complete
• (6) The Adventures of Tom Bombadil: poems "from the Red Book"
• (7) Bilbo's Last Song: a poem supposedly written by Bilbo as he traveled to the Havens
• (8) Smith of Wootton Major: the last story Tolkien wrote

Academic or semi-academic works

• (9) On Fairy Stories: a classic essay which describes in some detail what Tolkien was attempting with The Lord of the Rings

• (10) Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics: one of the most influential articles ever written about "Beowulf"

• (11) "The Homecoming of Beorthnoth, Beorthelm's Son": A brief verse-drama based on "The Battle of Malden", along with an essay on the poem

• (12) The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún: Tolkien's verse re-telling of a northern legend

• (13) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Pearl; Sir Orfeo: Tolkien's modern English translations of three famous Middle-English poems

• (14) The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun: Originally published in The Welsh Journal, a poem in the style of a Breton Lay

• (15) The Story of Kullervo: Tolkien's (prose) retelling of the Tale of Kullervo from the Finnish epic poem Kalevala. The influence of this story on the Tale of the Children of Húrin is very notable

• (16) Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary: A prose translation of "Beowulf", with notes and commentary. Tolkien never attempted a full alliterative verse translation of the poem, but he did translate some lines into that form, which are included in the essay cited above. The published edition of the prose translation also includes "Sellic Spell", a short tale by Tolkien reflecting his thoughts about the roots of the poem.

• (17) A Secret Vice: An essay/lecture Tolkien wrote about the art of creating artificial languages like his Elvish tongues.

• (18) The Road Goes Ever On (with Donald Swann): A song cycle with musical settings by singer/pianist Donald Swann, which contains a significant essay by Tolkien on the poem "Namarië" and the Quenya language

• (19) The Fall of Arthur: An unfinished original poem in alliterative verse based on the Arthurian legends. Published in a volume with several interesting essays by Christopher Tolkien on the context of the poem and its composition.

Many of these shorter works have been anthologized in various collections:

• The Tolkien Reader: Contains 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, and 11
• Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham: 4 and 8
• Tree and Leaf: 5 and 9; later editions also contain the poem "Mythopoeia," which is referred to in 9
• The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays: 9, 10, 17, plus "On Translating Beowulf", "English and Welsh", an essay on "Sir Gawain", and his "Valedictory Address" on retiring from Oxford
• A Tolkien Miscellany: 4, 6, 8, and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"
• Tales from the Perilous Realm: 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9
• Poems and Stories: 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11

Poetry

Tolkien published many poems in various magazines as well as, of course, in his fiction and in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. I have not attempted a bibliography of all of his poetry but I would love to see a collection published.

Art

Tolkien was an accomplished amateur artist and produced many sketches and paintings related to his work as well as other subjects. Several collections of his works have been published, and his publishers HarperCollins are in the process of producing a series of his principal works with his own illustrations, beginning with The Lord of the Rings (2022) and The Silmarillion.

Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien: There are three editions of this collection of images selected by Christopher Tolkien; the most recent is still in print and features newer, higher definition scans of the artwork.

J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator: A more general collection of Tolkien's art, with text by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull.

The Art of the Hobbit: Text by Hammond and Scull.

The Art of The Lord of the Rings: Text by Hammond and Scull.

Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth: A spectacular book assembled as part of the exhibition of Tolkien's art and manuscripts at the Bodleian Library at Oxford in 2018. Edited by Catherine McIlwaine, who is the curator of the Tolkien papers at the Bodleian.

Tolkien: Voyage en Terre du Milieu: Another spectacular book celebrating a similar exhibition held in France at the Bibliothèque François-Mitterand in 2019. Alas, the essays are in French.

Reference Works

These are works that are not by Tolkien but which are highly regarded as accurate.

The maps in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion were redrawn by Christopher Tolkien from his father's work. However, the scale leaves a bit to be desired, so others have filled in the blanks, based on detailed reading of the texts. The gold standard here is the late Karen Wynn Fonstad's Atlas of Middle-earth — be sure to get the Second Edition, which includes information from The History of Middle-earth. Barbara Strachey's Journeys of Frodo is also very good and both will give you an idea of the difficulties of reconciling Bilbo's journey in The Hobbit with Frodo's later trip over the same territory — a problem even Tolkien found insoluble.

For a general reference, Robert Foster's Complete Guide to Middle-earth is well-regarded, and has the approbation of Christopher Tolkien, no less.

Douglas A. Anderson's Annotated Hobbit contains much information about both the history of the text and its allusions and sources. Similarly, Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull have written The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion, which contains similar annotations. The same authors have written The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, a three-volume chronology and encyclopedia of Tolkien's life which is an excellent supplement and extension of the official biography by Humphrey Carpenter.

Addenda

I've added some comments below about less-common aspects of Tolkien's writing that people may be interested in.

Editions

Tolkien's works were a trial for his publishers and their typesetters, what with Elvish names, antiquated and idiosyncratic spellings, and so on. Much work has been done in the last 20 years by Christopher Tolkien and several others to correct the text — finally put into electronic form so a definitive version might actually be possible — so most modern editions are actually very close to what Tolkien intended, at least as far as can be determined. In the case of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, however, there's a slight complication: The versions currently in print are not what was originally printed; unlike most fiction, the terms second and third edition are actually meaningful for these works, as they were significantly revised.

The Hobbit

There are, for most practical purposes, three editions of The Hobbit. The first edition, published in 1937/1938, was very much a children's book and references to Tolkien's wider legendarium were more by way of background atmosphere than anything else. The writing of The Lord of the Rings and the much-enhanced significance of the Ring that Bilbo finds caused Tolkien to re-write a large portion of Chapter 5, "Riddles in the Dark", and tweak a few other related passages. These changes were incorporated into the second edition (1951), which became five pages longer. In 1965, in response to an issue over the American copyright of The Lord of the Rings (see below), Tolkien provided further revisions which were first incorporated into the Ballantine paperback edition and then taken up into the 1966 hardcover Allen & Unwin editions. This latter edition is the one most people have read.

Reading the first edition is an interesting experience, as the changes, although mostly minor, definitely affect the overall atmosphere of the book. HarperCollins, the successors to Allen & Unwin, released a facsimile of the first edition a couple of years ago, which is a good thing: Genuine first editions sell for anywhere from $500 to >$50,000, depending on impression and condition.

The Lord of the Rings

When Houghton Mifflin first published The Lord of the Rings in the United States, they relied largely on copies printed in the UK, to which they did not affix an American copyright notice as required by the US law at the time. There were also some clauses in the US copyright laws of the day requiring that books sold in the US be printed in the US beyond certain limits, and Houghton Mifflin seem to have violated those clauses as well. In the early 1960s, Ace Paperbacks, after unsuccessfully trying to gain the rights for a paperback edition, decided that the copyright was invalid and so proceeded to issue a completely unauthorized edition. Allen & Unwin cried foul, and Tolkien was asked to provide some revisions to the text to allow a firm copyright claim to be made. This resulted in the second edition in 1965, and the Ballantine paperback editions. The changes to the second edition were much more minor than those to The Hobbit's second edition; many of them fixed minor errors or clarified details of the geography. The details of the changes can be found in the Reader's Companion mentioned above.

More Academic Works

The texts I mentioned in the main article as "Academic Work" are derived primarily from lectures and other writings that, while academic in nature, were nevertheless intended for a less specialist audience than Tolkien's academic peers. He was, of course, a professor at Oxford, and as such published various papers and books related to Anglo-Saxon/Old English and Middle English. Some of these works are listed here.

• The Old English Exodus (ed. Joan Turville-Petre): Tolkien's edition of this poetical version of the Biblical book of Exodus, a translation, and comments derived from his lecture notes. This is one of the rarest of Tolkien books.
• Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode (ed. Alan Bliss): Like the Exodus, based on Tolkien's lecture notes. The tale of Finn and Hengest comes from a fragmentary poem called "The Fights at Finnesburg" and an episode in "Beowulf".
• Beowulf and the Critics (ed. Michael C. Drout): Tolkien's famous essay was based on lectures he delivered at Oxford, and Drout presents the texts of those lectures and shows the evolution of Tolkien's thought.

Full lists of Tolkien's academic publications are available on the web. Many of the papers are now available online due to the digitization of academic journals; however, lots of them are behind paywalls. If you have access to a university library you can probably download them there.

Books About Tolkien

Obviously there are literally hundreds of books and articles about Tolkien and his works, including an annual review publication called Tolkien Studies. So this list is merely a somewhat biased selection of a few highly recommended works — and is the list I'd most like to hear comments on, as well.

• Master of Middle-earth, Paul Kocher: Written pre-Silmarillion, it's still an excellent analysis
• J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Tom Shippey
• The Road to Middle-earth, Tom Shippey: Shippey's two books are a good starting point
• Tolkien and the Critics, ed. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose Zimbardo: An early collection of criticism, including the infamous review, "Ooo, those awful orcs!" by Edmund Wilson
• Understanding the Lord of the Rings, ed. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose Zimbardo: A more recent similar collection by the same editors
• J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, ed. Michael D.C. Drout: Okay, it's $200+, so look in libraries
• J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, Humphrey Carpenter: The only authorized biography of Tolkien, it's worth a read, but some of it should probably be taken with a grain of salt.
• Tolkien and the Great War, John Garth: An excellent book about Tolkien's experiences in World War I and the influence that had on his developing Legendarium.

Recommended Authors and Editors

• Tom Shippey
• Verlyn Flieger
• Christina Scull
• Wayne Hammond
• Jane Chance
• Mark Atherton
• Douglas A. Anderson
• Dmitra Fini
• Brian Sibley
• Corey Olsen
• Brian Rosebury
• Walking Tree Press has a whole series of books devoted to Tolkien, most of them collections of papers from various conferences.

Authors to Avoid

The most obvious one is David Day; despite making a career out of Tolkien-related books, his works are full of errors, bad assumptions, and other quirks, and are not recommended. They do usually contain some really nice illustrations, though.

I also cannot recommend the numerous books self-published by Alex Lewis and Elizabeth Curry (sometimes under the name "Ellansea").