The History of Middle-earth 5-Book Boxed Set: The Book of Lost Tales 1, The Book of Lost Tales 2, The Lays of Beleriand, The Shaping of Middle-earth, The Lost Road and Other Writings - Paperback

Christopher Tolkien's monumental posthumous project. The first five volumes in one boxed set — the drafts, lost tales, and alternate mythologies that became Middle-earth.

The History of Middle-earth is one of the strangest and most ambitious literary editing projects ever undertaken. When J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973, he left behind a vast archive of unpublished work: early versions of the legendarium, abandoned storylines, invented languages at various stages of development, cosmological drafts that contradicted themselves and the published books. His son Christopher, himself a medievalist and Oxford don, spent the next thirty-seven years editing it all into twelve volumes of scholarly apparatus and footnotes.

This boxed set collects the first five. The Book of Lost Tales (volumes 1 and 2) predates The Silmarillion by decades — the earliest form of the Middle-earth mythology, written in the trenches of the First World War. The Lays of Beleriand presents the same stories as long alliterative poems in the Old English tradition Tolkien taught at Oxford. The Shaping of Middle-earth and The Lost Road and Other Writings document the mythology's transformation through the 1930s, when Tolkien was also beginning what would eventually become The Lord of the Rings.

For readers who have already read the main books, this is where Middle-earth gets genuinely academic — and genuinely strange. For faculty in English, medieval studies, or philology, this is source material: drafts of a world in progress, with Christopher's editorial commentary functioning as a running tutorial on how mythology actually gets built.

DETAILS
- Format: paperback, 5-volume boxed set
- Volumes included: The Book of Lost Tales 1, The Book of Lost Tales 2, The Lays of Beleriand, The Shaping of Middle-earth, The Lost Road and Other Writings
- Series: The History of Middle-earth (Vols. 1–5 of 12)
- Editor: Christopher Tolkien
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt