Reading order

[Peter]

I am reading through the main 3 books currently. But I was wondering if there is a reading order for the books that go back in middle earth history? Such has morgoths ring, children of hurin, the fall of numenor, etc.

[Jose]

Yep there are...my suggested order is:
The Hobbit
The LoTR
Bilbo's Last Song
The Silmarillion
Unfinished Tales
The Children of Hurin
Beren and luthien
The Fall of Gondolin
The Fall of Númenor
(Optional re-read of LoTR together with The Journeysof Frodo and The Reader’s Companion)
The 12 vols of The History of Middle-earth in order
The Nature of Middle-earth
The History of The Hobbit

* The adventures of Tom Bombadil (insert this wherever you prefer, as long as it's after LoTR)

Upon a possible The Hobbit reread id suggest "The annotated hobbit"

That'd be all Middle-earth earth related...prepare your sofa and your wallet 😄😄😄

[Angus]

I’m a bit late to the party but this may be of interest. My order is very similar to the previous suggestion but with a bit of extra information.

TOLKIEN READING ORDER

As a Tolkien fan for over 50 years my advice to a first time reader would be to read the books in the following order, for reasons I’ll give in excruciating detail below:-

1. The Hobbit (1937)
2. The Lord of the Rings (1954/55)
3. The Silmarillion (1977)
4. Unfinished Tales (1980)
5. Beren and Lúthien (2017)
6. The Children of Húrin (2007)
7. The Fall of Gondolin (2018)
8. The Fall of Númenor (2022)
9. The Letters of JRR Tolkien (1981)
10. Volumes 1 to 12 of the History of Middle-earth (HoMe) (1984 - 1996)
11. The Nature of Middle-earth (2021)

I’m now going to give you a long history, most of which is based on Humphrey Carpenter’s excellent authorised biography of JRRT (1977). This biography can be read at any time, but perhaps is best done after LotR as it was published before any of the later books.

The great difficulty with Tolkien is that The Silmarillion is the first book that he worked on, and he did so until his death, as a means to provide the history for the languages he loved to create and also to provide a mythology for England. It actually covers the entire known history of Middle-earth from creation to the Fourth Age.

Tolkien’s conceit for The Silmarillion was that he was telling a “found history” written from an Elvish perspective where some parts were known in great detail and others were just outline stories. “Beren and Lúthien”, “The Children of Húrin” and “The Fall of Gondolin” were the Three Great Tales known in detail and told at length.

The Hobbit was an accidental children’s best seller into which parts of his Silmarillion mythology had “inevitably” crept in, such as Elrond, Gondolin and the Necromancer.

He wanted The Silmarillion to be the follow up but as it didn’t contain hobbits Allen and Unwin did not consider it to be suitable. Tolkien therefore embarked upon LotR into which even more of The Silmarillion back story was included. He really wanted LotR and The Silmarillion to be published together but Allen and Unwin weren’t prepared to do that (paper was extremely expensive in post WW2 UK and they did need to at least try to break even). Tolkien therefore spent a couple of years negotiating with Collins who had indicated they would publish both books but then wanted major cuts to LotR which were unacceptable to him.

He therefore returned to Allen and Unwin who still thought they’d lose £1,000 (about £34,300 in 2024 terms) but Rayner Unwin considered LotR to be a work of genius so his father agreed to publish based on a 50:50 deal of the profits (if any), instead of the more usual royalty basis.

Even then they had to split the single book of LotR into 3 volumes in order to make the price for each volume low enough that at least some people would be able to afford to buy them (about £36 each in 2024 terms). JRRT wasn’t keen on that split as it is not remotely conceived as a trilogy, but he recognised the commercial imperative. (He was especially unhappy about The Two Towers - both the title and the fact that Books III and IV have no link at all, separated from the rest of the book.) However, if that hadn’t been done there is a good chance hardly anyone would now be aware of LotR.

JRRT was still continually reworking The Silmarillion up until his death and it is a very different type of book from The Hobbit and LotR. Christopher was his literary executor and had to go through pages of typed and hand written material, often contradictory in nature, frequently illegible, to produce The Silmarillion.

In later life he was unhappy with some of the decisions he made for The Silmarillion, having had decades in which to further study his father’s papers. These are detailed by him in later books.

Unfinished Tales followed The Silmarillion and is very readable but does contain a large number of footnotes. It adds more detail to aspects of the First, Second and Third ages - some things are entirely new.

The 12 volume History of Middle Earth was published next, but they can be a hard read - often the commentaries are longer than the main text and it is a very academic approach to JRRT’s legacy and the development of his ideas for Middle-earth. That’s why I suggest reading them almost last.

Beren and Lúthien greatly expands The Silmarillion chapter XIX “Of Beren and Lúthien”. It is almost certainly the closest of the Three Great Tales to JRRT’s heart, as he identified his wife, Edith, as Lúthien, and by extension he was Beren - as per their gravestones. It introduces Tevildo the cat - only otherwise found in the HoMe series. A lot of this book is written in verse - Tolkien’s preferred format, but not very commercial. It is therefore a harder read for some people. Personally I loved it.

(If I find any troublesome parts I have found slowing down my reading and using a deep rolling voice in my head really makes the text come alive. There are online recordings of JRRT reading some of his own work and that’s the voice I try to use - go to the Tolkien Estate website.)

The Second Great Tale, The Children of Húrin is found in both The Silmarillion chapter XXI “Of Túrin Turambar” and in Unfinished Tales but pulls all the different parts into one cohesive version.

The final Great Tale, The Fall of Gondolin, is similarly found in one form in The Silmarillion chapter XXIII “Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin”, expanded upon in Unfinished Tales, and then the stand alone book gives the whole history of how that story changed over time with the same basic story being repeated in several different versions. It was actually the first story to have been written.

With all three of The Great Tales you could choose to read the longer version as you get to the relevant Silmarillion chapter, but obviously that will greatly extend the time it takes to complete The Silmarillion. E.g. for Túrin the hardback Silmarillion chapter is 29 pages long, and the additional material in Unfinished Tales (Part One Chapter II Narn I Hîn Húrin) is another 89 pages, where-as the main text of The Children of Húrin is 226 pages long.

The Fall of Númenor is a brilliant pulling together of everything related to the Second Age. It doesn’t add anything new to the previously published works but it does extract relevant information from LotR, The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, Letters, The 12 volume History of Middle-earth and The Nature of Middle-earth. It thus gives the clearest picture of the Second Age material that one can have without doing a colossal amount of personal research.

Letters is well worth reading as it includes a lot of answers to specific questions readers sent to Tolkien which are not answered anywhere else. E.g. who sent Gandalf back?, or where was the One Ring when Sauron was on Númenor?

Next I suggest reading the History. Those 12 volumes are very hard work for most people - in fact I stopped buying them when they first came out after volume X, Morgoth’s Ring, just because they are such hard work and were starting to ruin the published canon for me by seeing far too much of how the stories kept changing and the “workings of the sausage machine”. I still find them very tricky and a little repetitive, but they also contain very interesting ideas not written elsewhere. (I’ll add a bit more on this in a second comment.)

Lastly is the Nature of Middle-earth which I am still to read but I understand is a hodgepodge of short and incomplete notes not previously included in the History. Definitely one for completionists.

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil contains 16 hobbit poems which may also appeal.

Sorry this is so long but I hope it is useful and that you enjoy these works as much as I have and still do.

If you want to go beyond Middle-earth then I also love Smith of Wootton Major, Leaf by Niggle and Farmer Giles of Ham. Tolkien described himself as a Niggler.

[Angus]

The History of Middle-earth Series

A bit more on the HoMe series since I’m currently working my way through them - but crucially out of order.

HoMe gives the chronological history of the many manuscripts, typescripts, appended notes etc that JRRT used to draft his books, covering 1916 to 1973. JRRT had three phases of writing The Silmarillion - every phase includes multiple re-workings of the same stories, often with inherently contradictory content. Christopher goes through all these in great detail, with some very academic notes and commentaries. It can be both absolutely fascinating and also very dull to read.

I really struggled with books 1 and especially 2. In fact I stopped reading 2 part way through over 30 years ago and have only just gone back to trying the whole series again in the last year. Book 1 wasn’t too bad, book 2 I will never read again, book 10 and books 6 to 9 all got either 4 or 5 star ratings from me.

Books 6 to 9 are all LotR related or they reflect workings on The Silmarillion after LotR was published (10 to 12). Book 9 is made up of three distinct and very different parts - the first part on LotR is excellent, the second on the Notion Club papers very good, but the third on the drowning of Anadûnê is quite hard going, although also very interesting. LotR is my favourite of these books and I know it in a stupid amount of detail. Hence I find the complicated story behind its writing quite fascinating and am less worried by the same basic story being told in several different ways as it works its way to the published version. Similarly the later writings for The Silmarillion seem quite familiar when compared with the published version, so it is much easier going than the very archaic language used in the earliest versions that books 1 & 2 concentrate on. Book 10 has some absolutely fascinating stuff in it found nowhere else and adds hugely to much of JRRT’s fundamental thoughts on elves and men and their destinies within his sub-created world. I jumped to it after watching an online Tolkien Society conference and hearing Verlyn Flieger talk about it. If you never read any other of the HoMe series, but you enjoy The Silmarillion, then you should also read Book 10 “Morgoth’s Ring” - or at least Part 4 of it “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth” or “The Debate of Finrod and Andreth”.

[Andrew]

I don’t think you need to worry much about reading order. I am assuming you’ve read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It’s important, I believe, to read Tolkien without stopping in the middle of any given story. They’re not long. You won’t grasp where everything is on the map, or keep track of every character or plot line the first time through. Just enjoy the story. Let the mythology wash over you; in time, the characters and their paths will take root, and on rereading your favorite tales, they will bloom in full.

If you try to read all of Christopher’s notes, or pause every time to check the index for an unfamiliar word, that’s when many people become frustrated with books like The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales. Your reading order won’t make much difference in my view. Remember, it’s fantasy—do you truly need to know everything about a character while Tolkien is carrying you far away into a world where forests breathe with ancient song, rivers remember the footsteps of the Firstborn, and the very mountains seem to dream beneath the stars?