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A review by octavia_cade
The History of Middle-earth: Part One by J.R.R. Tolkien
3.0
I read and reviewed each of the five volumes collected here separately, so this is really just for my own records. The rating for the collection is the average of the individual ratings - everything got three stars, apart from The Lost Road (also the last read) which got two. It dropped down to two stars because I was, frankly, sick to fucking death of all the repetition. It's long been a reading goal of mine to work through the histories of Middle-earth, because The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are some of my favourite books of all time, but talk about sucking all the joy out of things...
I would like to credit Christopher Tolkien with all the work he's done on this series - and it's been a lot, credit where credit's due - but my goodness are his endless notes pendantic, dull, and deeply, deeply repetitive. By the time the reader has waded through these five volumes, plus The Silmarillion, they've had to read through same stories multiple times. With only very minor differences in each volume. (I never liked goddamn Turin but I fucking HATE him now. Frankly I'm siding with the dragon.)
The original material is genuinely interesting. But it becomes ever more apparent, as the histories go on, that they are as much a money-making exercise as anything else, because the sheer weight of repetition that readers are expected to both buy and swallow as these volumes go on is just plain exploitative. It's so bad I've actually taken a break from reading the histories because I'm so fed up with the same damn thing all over again.
I would like to credit Christopher Tolkien with all the work he's done on this series - and it's been a lot, credit where credit's due - but my goodness are his endless notes pendantic, dull, and deeply, deeply repetitive. By the time the reader has waded through these five volumes, plus The Silmarillion, they've had to read through same stories multiple times. With only very minor differences in each volume. (I never liked goddamn Turin but I fucking HATE him now. Frankly I'm siding with the dragon.)
The original material is genuinely interesting. But it becomes ever more apparent, as the histories go on, that they are as much a money-making exercise as anything else, because the sheer weight of repetition that readers are expected to both buy and swallow as these volumes go on is just plain exploitative. It's so bad I've actually taken a break from reading the histories because I'm so fed up with the same damn thing all over again.