A review by marvelruinedmyspirit
Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode by J.R.R. Tolkien

2.0

I have beef with Mr. Alan Bliss as an editor, and where is why:

• Mr. Bliss did everything he possibly could to make Tolkien's text big enough to be a book, including writing a preface and an editor's introduction (there is also an author's introduction), and putting the original texts twice. I feel like if there's only 50 pages' worth of stuff, we could just make the book 50 pages.
• For some reason the translation was put after the textual commentary, which made little sense.
• Said textual commentary as well as the glossary of names should have been edited better (or at all). On the whole, Christopher Tolkien did a much superior job with his father's notes on Beowulf.
• The most interesting part of the book was the few pages of Tolkien's reconstructions (in my opinion), AKA the appendices, but for some reason another appendix was added by Mr. Bliss, which I thought a tad random; I'm not saying his theory wasn't interesting, but it didn't belong there, he should maybe have published his papers on their own and not mixed the two.
• Also, despite stretching the text as much as he could, for some reason he could not be bothered to translate the latin quotes in his own paper.

Tl;dr: Alan Bliss should have just gone ahead and written his own book. Christopher should have taken this one.