Customer Reviews

Sauron Defeated: The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part Four (The History of Middle-Earth, Vol. 9)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In "Sauron Defeated", Christopher Tolkien brings to a close "The History of The Lord of the Rings", a subset within his "The History of Middle Earth". Like the previous three volumes in this series, Christopher traces the development of his father's thought as the final chapters of The Lord of the Rings are written. Of special interest are the early conceptions of "The Scouring of the Shire" and the two versions of the never-published "Epilogue". The Epilogue was, to me, particularly touching, as it involved Sam, now a middle-aged hobbit with a houseful of kids, reading to his family and keeping the Story alive.

HOWEVER, the above material, while unable to fit into the previous volume (The War of the Ring), was not enough to warrent a volume all by itself. So Christopher has also included "The Notion Club Papers" -- a space/time/dream travel story, written at the same time as The Lord of the Rings was being developed. The story itself involves Numenor -- Tolkien's telling of the Atlantis saga. Of particular interest to CS Lewis fans, "The Notion Club Papers" purports to be a discussion of (among other things) Lewis' own space travel fiction, penned in the late 30's and early 40's. It's a shame that this story was never brought to completion -- I'm finding the ideas it expresses to be quite interesting.

Again, 5 stars, both for the Master, and for the tireless work of Christopher.

In the ninth volume of The History of Middle Earth and the last dealing with LOTR Christopher Tolkien gives us not only the original ending to Tolien's epic trilogy, but also an essay called the Notion Club Papers, an edition of the Drowning Of Anadune, and information on Adunaic which was one of Tolkien's invented languages. I liked this book very much even though the Notion Club was hard to read at times. Thankfully, this is the last edition dealing with LOTR and Tolkien soon turns again to his father's greatest work, The Silmarillion. I recommend this book to any Tolkien fan.

The title of this book should say it all. Certainly a book designed for die-hard Tolkien fans, 'Sauron Defeated' hardly represents interesting reading for people unfamiliar with the Lord of the Rings series. That said, the thick volume is still essential for anyone who has read the previous three chapters of the History. Although some parts of 'Sauron Defeated' are better off left out in its next edition, it presents enough interesting information in its 482 pages to make it a worthwhile (not to mention impressive) presence in your Tolkien library.

`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.

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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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.

This book has three great strengths:

1. Two versions of the delightful Epilogue to the Lord of the Rings. This was the original end of LotR, and remained so until an advanced stage in its production, and Tolkien seems always to have wished it had remained so but was persuaded to delete it by some of his friends.

2. The Notion Club Papers - an extremely important unfinished novel by JRR Tolkien in a 'modern' setting but with much reference to space and time travel. This was written in the middle of composing the Lord of the Rings, so has Tolkien at the height of his powers. Also, there are many coded clues to Tolkien's own deepest, and secret, beliefs.

3. Several alternative version of the history of Numenor, with a lot of extra (and more vivid) detail than can be found in the LotR or Silmarillion.

Without exaggeration, and speaking as a long term Tolkien fan, this is one of the most interesting books I have ever read. Full stop.

This is volume 9 in the History of Middle earth series, Christopher Tolkien's effort to publish every word his father wrote about his imagined world. Those new to Tolkien should be forewarned not to read this, or any other volume in the History series, until they have first read and fallen in love with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, at least.

This volume covers the final chapters of The Lord of the Rings. While the story was now fairly complete, there was still room for tangent and false starts and dead ends here and there, and once again reading through all the versions, while fascinating, can be confusing for any but the most dedicated of Tolkien enthusiasts.

This volume also contains The Notion Club Papers, an abandoned writing project which contains some material on Numenor, and also has connections to the writings of C.S. Lewis and other members of the Inklings, the circle of friends who were the first to hear much of The Lord of the Rings read aloud, in stages over many years, by its author.

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.

I would only recommend this book to a hard core Tolkien fan. A great source of information on the development of LOTR, but can be a bit tedious to get through.