The History of Middle-earth

The History of Middle-earth is a 12-volume series of books published from 1983 through 1996 that collect and analyse material relating to the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, compiled and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien. Some of the content consists of earlier versions of already published works, while other portions are new material. These books are extremely detailed, often analysing a scrap of paper to provide the full evolution of two or even three different versions of a passage that were rewritten over each other. Christopher Tolkien has documented the history of the writing of the Middle-earth stories in as much detail as his father documented the fictional history of Middle-earth itself. However, numerous unpublished texts are still known to exist in the Bodleian and Marquette University libraries and in other papers held by individuals, such as the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship.
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