The Complete Guide to Middle-earth

The Complete Guide to Middle-earth: from The Hobbit to The Silmarillion is a reference book for the fictional universe of J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, compiled and edited by Robert Foster.

The Complete Guide to Middle-earth
Dust jacket of 1978 edition
AuthorRobert Foster
Cover artistThe Brothers Hildebrandt
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
SubjectTolkien's legendarium
GenreReference
PublisherBallantine Books
Publication date
1978
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages573 pp
ISBN0-345-44976-2 (2001 edition)
OCLC48541956
Preceded byA Guide to Middle-earth, Mirage Press, 1971 

The Complete Guide to Middle-earth is a major expansion of Foster's 'A Guide to Middle-earth, which was published in a limited edition by Mirage Press in 1971. Almost twice the length of the original (573 pages vs. 292 pages), the 1978 version incorporates extensive entries related to The Silmarillion (1977). A further revised edition (ISBN 0-345-44976-2) was published in 2001 in time for The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

The Complete Guide to Middle-earth is generally recognised as an excellent reference book on Middle-earth.[1] Christopher Tolkien has commended it himself as an "admirable work of reference".[2] However, as it does not include information on post-Silmarillion material (i.e. Unfinished Tales and the series The History of Middle-earth), the 1978 edition contains some assertions contradicted by later publications. For example, the Star of Elendil jewel (Elendilmir) is identified with the Star of the Dúnedain given to Samwise Gamgee, but Christopher Tolkien refutes this.[3][4] It also includes speculation on matters later confirmed in subsequent works. For example, Foster proposes Gandalf and Olórin are one and the same - confirmed in Unfinished Tales.

A German edition, Das Große Mittelerde-Lexikon, revised and translated by Helmut W. Pesch, was published in 2002.[5]

A Guide to Middle-earth
A Guide to Middle-earth
Front of wrap-around dust jacket
AuthorRobert Foster
Cover artistTim Kirk
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
SubjectTolkien's legendarium
GenreReference
Published1971 (Mirage Press, Baltimore, Maryland)
Media typeHardcover and Paperback
Pages292
Followed byThe Complete Guide to Middle-earth (revised and expanded edition) 

A Guide to Middle-earth was the first published encyclopedic reference book for the fictional universe of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, compiled and edited by Robert Foster. The book was published in 1971 by Mirage Press, a specialist science fiction and fantasy publisher, in a limited edition of 2000 copies (750 numbered hardcovers and 1250 unnumbered paperbacks). A paperback edition was issued by Ballantine Books in 1974.[6]

The author profile on the first edition describes Robert Foster as the then-"Tengwar Consultant" to the Tolkien Society of America, and the book incorporates material previously published in the science fiction fanzine Niekas.

Lester del Rey praised the 1971 version for covering "literally everything you wanted to know about Middle Earth and were unable to discover before."[7]

gollark: Character *trees*.
gollark: With 64 bits of mantissa.
gollark: Macron idea: all values are just 80-bit floats.
gollark: Macron idea: analog pointers with crosstalk.
gollark: Whenever an error happens, it randomly mutates nearby AST nodes until it works.

See also

References

Notes

  1. See, for example, Drout, Michael D. C., ed.: J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, editor's Introduction, p. xxix, where Drout refers to the book by the title of the 1971 edition
  2. Tolkien, Christopher "Introduction" to Tolkien, J. R. R. Unfinished Tales, p.6 : "If I have been inadequate in explanation or unintentionally obscure, Mr Robert Foster's Complete Guide to Middle-earth supplies, as I have found through frequent use, an admirable work of reference."
  3. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1980), Christopher Tolkien (ed.), Unfinished Tales, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Footnote 33 in 'The Disaster of the Gladden Fields', p. 284, ISBN 0-395-29917-9
  4. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1990), Christopher Tolkien (ed.), The War of the Ring, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Footnote 8 in 'Many Roads Lead Eastward (1)', p. 309, ISBN 0-395-56008-X
  5. Drout, J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, p. 240
  6. See Drout, Michael D. C., ed.: J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, Routledge, 2006, ISBN 0-415-96942-5, pp.655-656
  7. "Reading Room", If, September 1974, p.132

Bibliography

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