The History of Middle-earth
HoME 1-12 — the twelve-volume edition of the legendarium's texts, from the earliest tales to the late writings
Nature
The twelve-volume History of Middle-earth, edited by Christopher Tolkien (1983-1996), is the great documentary edition of the legendarium: it prints, in order, the making of the mythology from the Book of Lost Tales of the 1910s through the late philosophical and Third Age writings, with Christopher’s full commentary. Every strand of the Silmarillion matter — the cosmogony, the Quenta, the annals, the Númenórean and the Third Age material — appears here in its textual history, and the series is the primary source record of this vault’s Texts category.
Contents
The series runs: (1-2) The Book of Lost Tales I-II (1983-84) — the original legendarium; (3) The Lays of Beleriand (1985) — the two great lays; (4) The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986) — the earliest Quenta and cosmology; (5) The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987) — the Akallabêth and the time-travel story; (6-9) the four volumes on the making of The Lord of the Rings — The Return of the Shadow (1988), The Treason of Isengard (1989), The War of the Ring (1990), Sauron Defeated (1992); (10) Morgoth’s Ring (1993) — the late cosmology and the Athrabeth; (11) The War of the Jewels (1994) — the later Annals and Quenta; (12) The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996) — the genealogies and late lore.
Composition
The idea of publishing the “lost tales” was taken up with Allen & Unwin in the 1970s after the 1977 Silmarillion; over thirteen years Christopher Tolkien assembled the sequence, printing text after text with his commentary, indexes, and the genealogical and chronological apparatus. The series is thus both the evidence of what Tolkien actually wrote and the record of how the 1977 Silmarillion was shaped from it.