too many editorial notes!

[Mountainman91]

This book was a good read overall, lots of tragic and beautiful poetry and some plot elements from the Silmarillion. Christopher Tolkien's copious notes (which make up over half of the book) are copious, boring, and unnecessarily detailed. What do you guys think?

[X]

Yes, there are a lot of notes, and yes, they are detailed and slow reading. I found that they helped explain how the poems differed from the early prose forms and how they changed as Tolkien was writing them. I also appreciated how they explained some of the more obscure usages of the language. The notes are not vital to the enjoyment or understanding of the poems, so it's easy to simply read the poems and skip the notes if one wishes to do so.