Perspective

Two perspectives are to be found in The Shaping of Middle-Earth, that of J.R.R. Tolkien and of his son Christopher Tolkien. The Shaping of Middle-Earth is the fourth volume in a twelve volume series put together by Christopher Tolkien from J.R.R. Tolkien's unfinished work. Each work of Tolkien's, in all seven chapters, is reprinted, sometimes in several versions, as are his maps, but most of the actual text is Christopher Tolkien's detailed commentary on the revisions, many of the details of which are so complex and distinct from one another that little common information can be drawn from them.

All of Tolkien's work in The Shaping of Middle-Earth consists in earlier versions of later published works or more developed unpublished works. Most of the elder Tolkien's text is a series of versions or partial versions of previous versions of the Silmarillion, Tolkien's history of...