{"product_id":"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-paperback","title":"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","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eChristopher Tolkien's monumental posthumous project. The first five volumes in one boxed set — the drafts, lost tales, and alternate mythologies that became Middle-earth.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 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 When J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973, he left behind a vast archive of unpublished work: early versions of the legendarium, abandoned storylines, invented languages at various stages of development, cosmological drafts that contradicted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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis boxed set collects the first five. \u003cem\u003eThe Book of Lost Tales\u003c\/em\u003e (volumes 1 and 2) predates \u003cem\u003eThe Silmarillion\u003c\/em\u003e by decades — the earliest form of the Middle-earth mythology, written in the trenches of the First World War. \u003cem\u003eThe Lays of Beleriand\u003c\/em\u003e presents the same stories as long alliterative poems in the Old English tradition Tolkien taught at Oxford. \u003cem\u003eThe Shaping of Middle-earth\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eThe Lost Road and Other Writings\u003c\/em\u003e document the mythology's transformation through the 1930s, when Tolkien was also beginning what would eventually become \u003cem\u003eThe Lord of the Rings\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDETAILS\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n- Format: paperback, 5-volume boxed set\u003cbr\u003e\n- 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\u003cbr\u003e\n- Series: The History of Middle-earth (Vols. 1–5 of 12)\u003cbr\u003e\n- Editor: Christopher Tolkien\u003cbr\u003e\n- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43873789116513,"sku":"9780345466457","price":56.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0629\/4978\/5697\/files\/cW5iRHF2VmtEOWpsMkRCSFExcGtEQT09.webp?v=1775319718","url":"https:\/\/shop.fpxp.io\/products\/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-paperback","provider":"Inkwell General Store","version":"1.0","type":"link"}