J. R. R. Tolkien

A collection of illustrated letters from Father Christmas recapping the activities of the preceding year at the North Pole. The letters were written and illustrated by the author to his children.

It is well known that J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings in 1954-5. What may be less known is that he continued to write about Middle-earth in the decades that followed, right up until the years before his death in 1973. For him, Middle-earth was part of an entire world to be explored, and the writings in The Nature of Middle-earth reveal the journeys that he took as he sought to better understand his unique creation....

A collection of Tolkien's unpublished manuscripts dealing with events from the Elder Days of Middle-earth to the end of the War of the Rings.

The Book of Lost Tales was the first major work of imagination by J.R.R. Tolkien, begun in 1916, when he was twenty-five years old, and left incomplete several years later. It stands at the beginning of the entire conception of Middle-earth and Valinor, for the Lost Tales were the first form of the myths and legends that came to be called The Silmarillion. Embedded in English legend and association, they are set in the narrative frame of the great...

Coming from the darker side of J.R.R. Tolkien's imagination, this is an important non Middle-earth work to set alongside his other retellings of existing myth and legend, "The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún," "The Fall of Arthur," and "The Story of Kullervo." "Set 'in Britain's land beyond the seas' during the age of chivalry, The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun tells of a childless Breton lord and lady (the 'Aotrou' and 'Itroun' of the title) and the tragedy...

Study of the Appendices to "The Lord of the Rings," which contain the historical structure of the Second and Third Ages, with additional writings from Tolkien's later years offering new insights into his fictional world, and the abandoned beginnings of two other stories.