Hacker News Reader

Comment by gpderetta | Hacker News Reader

Is this the first book (except for the Hobbit and LOTR of course) not edited by Christopher Tolkien? Hopefully it will maintain the high quality of the others.

View on HN

The article is a little contradictory on that, it first states that Brian Sibley is the editor but in the quote of Brian Sibley he states his task as 'bringing together J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings (under the editorship of Christopher Tolkien) relating to the dramatic history spanning the Second Age of Middle-earth'.

So it says further down: “ Presenting for the first time in one volume the events of the Second Age as written by J.R.R. Tolkien and originally and masterfully edited for publication by Christopher Tolkien”

So “originally” edited by Christopher Tolkien (who is dead), further editing by Brian Sibley.

I wonder if the edits were to bring it inline with the woke amazon series?

(I heard it was woke first, over plot/canon, but this could be false.)

Huh good point. A sad day for the Tolkien Estate if this is true.

I (perhaps over-optimistically) read it as Brian Sibley is taking the various edited work Christopher Tolkien did on the Second Age texts and bringing them together in a single place, in order, with some sort of commentary or framework around them. Doesn't sound like he's actually re-working the texts themselves, but who knows.

No, The Nature of Middle Earth was done by Carl F Hostetter.

Oh, that's also very recent. Published last year. But the editing apparently started 25 years ago.

A bunch of them have been edited by Verlyn Flieger as well (like Kullervo and Aotrou and Itroun).

And other books have been edited by other people still, see the list here for example: https://www.tolkiensociety.org/author/books-by-tolkien .

Reply on news.ycombinator.com