Unfinished Tales

Tonight on Keeping Up With the Númenóreans: a man prioritizes his sailing adventures over quality time with his wife. Aldarion has joined my list of fictional Tolkien crushes alongside Glorfindel, Finrod Felagund, Legolas, Aragorn, Faramir, and Éomer. Is he a selfish asshole? Yes. Does he deserve to......more

This is the first work that showed us how Tolkien's obsessive perfectionism was a double-edged sword. On the one hand it gave us the wonderfully deep world and implied distances of The Lord of the Rings; and on the other hand it left us with a jumble of tales in various states of revision and develo......more

I have always found it difficult to write about Tolkien’s work because it is the pillar in which modern fantasy is built upon. Indeed, without Tolkien fantasy would not be the shape it is today. It would be something different. And a lot of readers and writers recognise this, but I do not think we a......more

Out of all the posthumously published works of Tolkien, and this being the primary right after the Silmarillion, I have to admit it is the most interesting. We do get more expanded treatments of some of these tales in subsequent books, but all in all, the narrative structure of this tome is quite pl......more

I‘ve finally made it! Some chapters were really tough to get through. Pages and pages of descriptions of battles, territories and genealogies had me struggling at times, which is also why it took me forever to read this; I just wasn’t always in the right frame of mind. But it was also amazing! I am......more