JRR Tolkien, ed. By Carl F Hostetter
Completed 1/3/2026, Reviewed 1/3/2026
3 stars
This was an interesting collection of Middle-Earth facts and figures that Tolkien worked out from about 1959 to 1969. He continued to write many notes and essays to clarify and make sense of disparities amongst all his works. This book was divided into three sections: Time and Aging; Body, Mind, and Spirit; and The World, Its Lands, and Its Inhabitants. Sometimes, the editor presented whole pieces and the iterations it went through. Sometimes, it was fragments that Christopher Tolkien did not include in his twelve volume History of Middle-Earth series. By arranging them all in the above three categories, the information made a little more sense, although the amount of detail often got overwhelming.
The first section, Time and Aging, was the toughest to get through. Time moved differently for the Elves than Humans. And time moved differently for the Elves depending on when they were in Middle-Earth versus when they were in Valinor. Elves lived to be about 200 years old in Elvish time. However, one Elvish year was about 144 sun years. Tolkien spent an inordinate amount of time calculating the generations of Elves from their awakening through each of the ages based on their average ages of maturity and reproduction. It was very complicated and by the end of the section, rather tedious.
The Body, Mind, Spirit section was a little more interesting. It covered things like puberty, sexual maturity, beards, language, and descriptions of the characters. (As one reviewer I read said, despite Tolkien writing that Gandalf was 5’6” and anyone descended from the Numenorean kings were half-Elven and therefore beardless, I will always think of Gandalf as tall and Aragorn and Boromir as bearded. Even before Peter Jackson, the Brothers Hildebrandt painted them this way.) After the physical descriptions, Tolkien delves deeply into the Elven mind and spirit, focusing on the connections between them. As the Elven body aged ever so slowly, their mind and spirit grew in knowledge and wisdom. They did not fall to senility and body degradation as humans did. They chose when to pass on before their body reached the point where their minds would begin to fail. There’s a lot of philosophizing in this section concerning non-verbal communication, fate, free will, reincarnation and death. Not all of it is exactly lined out and of course there are several versions of most of the texts, so Tolkien postulates many ideas. It also becomes tough to follow after a while.
By the time I got to the last section, I was getting tired. Many divergent topics are covered, like the making of lembas, the nature of the Elvish economy, the Elvish relationships with horses, details on the Numenoreans, and the nature of Dwarvish voices. Some of it’s interesting, but it all felt tedious. Having read the complete History of Middle-Earth, this felt extraneous. I was finishing it just to finish it, rather than to enjoy it. For some reason, I was expecting to be wowed a little more than I was. This book felt like more of an afterthought to Christopher Tolkien’s work rather than new revelations. Still, it was good to have it all organized like this. That, at least, was coherent. So, I give this book three stars out of five.
I’m going to paraphrase another reviewer, because it made me laugh: Me after reading all 12 "History of Middle-earth" books and "The Nature of Middle-earth": I pass the test. I will diminish and go into the West and remain Stephen.
