the past 3 books I had to give a 4 and I felt absolutely horrible doing that, but I am back on the 5 train...

books:


	• Sauron Defeated: The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part Four (The History of Middle-Earth, Vol. 9) J.R.R. Tolkien Houghton Mifflin, 1992 - 496 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

For the Scholarly Tolkien fan

I have been reading this book as part of a research project. The essence of the book is a play by play of the development of the LOTR through multiple drafts. If someone is looking for a continuation of the entertaining series, I would suggest first The Silmarillion, then Lost Tales, Lays of Beleriand, or Unfinished Tales. For the serious Tolkien fan who wants to understand the origins, the book does a good job of organizing the multiple drafts and highlighting significant shifts in Tolkien's thought.

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The book arrived quickly and in good condition. I would purchase from this seller again.

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From the slopes of Orodruin to the Gray Havens, plus more.

`Sauron Defeated' is the last of a four volume series (`The History of the Lord of the Rings') within a series, (volume IX of `The History of Middle Earth') edited by Christopher Tolkien, from the unpublished writings of his father, J. R. R. Tolkien, most famous as the author of `The Hobbit' and `The Lord of the Rings' (LotR).

The most important thing to realize about this book is that only about a third of its pages deal with `The History of The Lord of the Rings'. The remaining two-thirds deals with a subject which harks back to `The Lost Road' and the wager taken up between the two `Inklings' (an Oxford literary and social society), Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.

The LotR story in this book covers the last few days of Sam and Frodo in Mordor, as they painfully make their way to the Cracks of Doom on Orodruin in order to finally destroy the `One Ring'. This takes a very few pages, after which we are left with the notes on the long and slow road home, to one of to me the most interesting episodes in the whole LotR, `The Scouring of the Shire'. I can easily understand why Peter Jackson left this episode and the events involving Tom Bombadil from his films (ten hours is surely long enough for even a cinematic event of these proportions), but they still remain my favorite events.

The middle third of the book is taken up with `The Notion Club Papers', which appears to be a fictional account of the goings-on at the real live `Inkling' meetings at Oxford. There is a lot of playful parodying here, especially on some of C. S. Lewis' works. These drafts also use a conceit most famously used by Robert Graves in his `I, Claudius' and `Claudius The God' novels, where it is made out that these papers were discovered among discarded papers in the year 2012 (about 60 years after they were actually written.) The final third of this volume is filled with additional versions of Tolkien's Atlantis myth, entitled `The Drowning of Anadune', the events which lead the Numenorean ancestors to flee to Middle Earth and become the Dunedain.

The primary relevance of these materials to LotR lie in the fact that Tolkien seems to have put aside work on LotR to do these things, until his erstwhile publisher, Stanley Unwin gently prodded him into returning to completing LotR.

The LotR fanatic, these `The Notion Club Papers' have much less interest than LotR notes or even the Numenor myths, but there they are, certainly useful for any study of the times and doings of Oxford during the real war raging just on the other side of the channel.

Pending my review of the last three books of `The History of Middle Earth', I suspect these four are easily the most interesting to fans of Tolkien's published works.

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the past 3 books I had to give a 4 and I felt absolutely horrible doing that, but I am back on the 5 train for the rest of these

So maybe you didn't fly through the last 3 books like the first five, but get ready to put your seatbelt on for this ride. The start of this book finished off the evolution of the lord, and also gives a pretty cool story where sam is answering his kids questions of what happened in the war of the ring.

The second part is back to the stuff that I love. I have reread the wierd inklings fictiot piece a number odf times, and it gets more interesting every time. My first time reading it, it was very hard for me to understand.

The third part of the book is certainly one of the coolest things that I have ever read. It is a totally superior version to the silmarillion of the fall of numenor. Anybody looking to go into the mind of sauron a little deeper, this is a MUST BUY for you!!!!!!!!!!

The last part of this book will go over most peoples heads(at least I hope so, cause it went way over mine.), it is a GREAT writing about the language of Adunic? I don't really speak any of tolkien's languages, but still like to read his essay-type papers on his languages. Though not as interesting as the lost tales and stuff like that, I still found all of them fun to read, and this one on the Adunic language I thought was the best out of them all.

OVERALL ONE HELL OF AN ADDITION TO THE HISTORY OF MIDDLE EARTH SERIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Good Reference Material

For those of us who enjoy taking Tolkien's vision and expanding upon it, this book and the "History of Middle Earth" series is a must as a reference source.

This book and the whole series expounds on Tolkien's vision and desire for his characters. Often nuggets of data not found in the primary books (LotR, The Hobbitt, etc.) can be uncovered within the HoME.

reviews: page 1, 2

In the first part of Sauron Defeated, Christopher Tolkien completes his account of the writing of The Lord of the Rings, beginning with Sam's rescue of Frodo from the Tower of Kirith Ungol, and giving a very different account of the Scouring of the Shire. This part ends with versions of the previously unpublished Epilogue, an alternate ending to the masterpiece in which Sam attempts to answer his children's questions years after the departure of Bilbo and Frodo from the Grey Havens. The second part introduces The Notion Club Papers, now published for the first time. Written by J.R.R. Tolkien in the interval between The Two Towers and The Return of the King (1945-1946), these mysterious Papers, discovered in the early years of the twenty-first century, report the discussions of a literary club in Oxford in the years 1986-1987. Those familiar with the Inklings will see a parallel with the group whose members included J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. After a discussion of the possiblities of travel through space and time through the medium of 'true dream," the story turns to the legend of Atlantis, the strange communications received by members of the club out of remote past, and the violent irruption of the legend into northwestern Europe. Closely associated with the Papers is a new version of the Numenorean legend, The Drowning of Anadune, which constitutes the third part of the book. At this time the language of the Men of the West, Adunaic, was first devised - Tolkien's fifteenth invented language. The book concludes with an elaborate account of the structure of this language by Arundel Lowdham, a member of the Notion Club, who learned it in his dreams. Sauron Defeated is illustrated with the changing conceptions of the fortress of Kirith Ungol and Mount Doom, previously unpublished drawings of Orthanc and Dunharrow, and fragments of manuscript written in Numenorean script.

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