The most recommended Middle Earth books

I love a good, solid, chewy book of critical essays around a specific theme—I know, it’s a specialized taste. This is a good one.

Yes, I’d love to tramp peacefully around Middle-earth with the field guide I reviewed above, but there are horrors there as well, and this collection gives Tolkien’s dragons, wolves, spiders, and other monsters their due.

This one’s for the hardcore Tolkien reader, but it’s a gem. It’s a collection of academic essays on The History of Middle-earth, (the foundational stories that lie behind Tolkien’s more popular works, some of which made it into The Silmarillion). Flieger and Hostetter are giants of Tolkien academia, and their individual works are well worth seeking out. The essays cover language, theme, structure, mythology, and other areas of literary criticism. As a writer, one in particular struck a chord with me: Hammond’s A Continuing and Evolving Creation. This explores how Tolkien actively worked on his vast mythology his entire life, revising, adding, and even re-conceiving elements as his understanding of his own work changed, and it offers a flavour of how one man could transform his experience, imagination, and beliefs into a personal mythology that has captured and enraptured so many readers.   

This book, again by JRR Tolkien, was published in 1977, actually four years after its author’s death. It deals with Middle Earth long before The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, both set in the Third Age.

It concerns a foe, Melkor, who is infinitely more powerful than Sauron, the adversary in the later books. Tolkien himself summarises it better than anyone: "The Silmarillion is the history of the War of the Exiled Elves against the Enemy. Several tales of victory and tragedy are caught up in it; but it ends with catastrophe, and the passing of the Ancient World, the world of the long First Age." Tolkien’s son Christopher had to finish something that was not fully complete.

For some, it might be an effort to keep up with the intricate cultural and in-depth world building than anything we see in the Third Age, yet again the… show more.

Tolkien is my all-time favorite author. The material in this book had appeared before, but was scattered all over in books published over several decades. 

Bringing all this material together and organizing it in a more coherent fashion makes the stories come alive like never before and allows the reader to more easily situate them within the grand scope of Tolkien’s mythology. Moreover, the depth, beauty, and complexity of the writing demonstrate just how much more erudite Tolkien was than most of the hacks posing as fantasy authors today. You get a real sense of the history of Middle Earth.

When I started college, I majored in English because I had ambitions of becoming a Tolkien scholar. I was also interested in history, particularly that of Asia, which just seemed deeper and more mysterious than the Western history I learned in high school. But by the end of my first… show more.

If you are anything like me, one of the reasons you keep coming back to Middle-earth is the landscape. This is the field guide I want to take on my next trip!

This is a very thoroughly researched compendium of information and folklore about real-world plants in Tolkien’s world—and about his invented plants as well. It's nicely illustrated, too!

Verlyn Flieger is the doyenne of Tolkien criticism, and this collection sees her at her best.

I’ve often found that her brilliance lies in pointing out what’s been hiding in plain sight–and once you have seen it, your view is forever changed. “But What Did He Really Mean?” and “Politically Incorrect Tolkien” are my favorites, but there are many gems here worth excavating.

Whilst the Lord of the Rings trilogy should be read as one story, my favourite of the series is the second book, The Two Towers.

I loved the separation of our characters and the focus on one narrative concerning one group in its entirety before we see what happens to the other group. It was a new way of reading when I first read The Two Towers.

Prior, my encounter with books containing multiple storylines saw intercut sections, switching from one set of characters to the other.

I particularly enjoyed the overarching dread surrounding the story of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum. For me, there were many gut-wrenching moments when hope fizzled away. The character building in these moments is exquisite.

Beautifully written and well worth a read.

I reread The Lord of the Rings trilogy once a year, with the hopes of absorbing anything I can from his mastery of how language can be used to strike a blow into a reader’s mind.

The story is written so well; each paragraph is like sitting with an old friend and reminiscing about the good old days shared together. It helps through times good and not-so-good, and the range of emotions invoked are staggering. While some say it can be too flowery, I saw there are few published works as perfect as these books. And it has something for everyone, whether the reader is a lover of adventure, history, or atmosphere.

I am fascinated by the contradictions of Tolkien’s women and by the tension between Christian and pagan in his writing.

This book is particularly valuable for its explication of Tolkien’s integration of Marian and Valkyrie imagery, resulting in female characters of transcendental beauty and heroism. And the writing is absorbing and informative.

This is an odd book in some ways. It’s half narrative, half editorial commentary. But I absolutely loved it as a look at the creative process and writing for the sheer joy of writing.

What we have here is a few early stories by Tolkien which show the genesis of his Middle-earth setting along with commentary by his son Christopher. You see Tolkien’s ideas evolve, which was a great reminder that writing is often about polishing, editing, and distilling concepts.

But it was also fun to read, knowing it was just stuff Tolkien was playing with. At the time of writing, he had no thoughts of publishing it. Indeed, it was never published until a few years after his death. He was just writing and creating for his own enjoyment.