Framed Site
Reading Order Calculator • Reading Order FAQ • Gory Details • Links
Science Fiction Timeline Site
•
Chronological Tolkien
Framed Site
Reading Order Calculator
•
Reading Order FAQ
•
Gory Details
•
Links
How does the new book The Children of Húrin fit into this? Was this book really written by J.R.R. Tolkien? 
Sure. Once you've written all the margin notes, you can start anywhere and end anywhere. Here are some suggestions:
If you want to read about the First Age of Middle-earth, start from the beginning of The Silmarillion and read until the founding of Númenor.
If you want to read about history of Númenor and Middle-earth during the Second Age, start with "Akallabêth" in The Silmarillion and read until Númenor is no more. The part of Tolkien's saga is often overlooked – especially the first thousand years, when the Dwarves of Moria and the Elves of Eregion were good friends, when wild and primitive men roamed the heavily-forested lands of Middle-earth, and no one suspected that the Shadow might rise again....
If you want to read about the history of the Third Age, start with section CE in "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age" in The Silmarillion.
If you want to read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with all the extra stuff added in, begin with section LB of "The Quest for Erebor" in Unfinished Tales.
If you just want to read the events that take place after the end of The Lord of the Rings, begin with "The Grey Havens" (the final chapter of Return of the King) and read until the end of the whole chronological ordering!
No! If you have never read The Lord of the Rings, you should read it first. Don't start by trying to read all of Tolkien's Middle-earth stories in chronological order.
Many of the passages in Unfinished Tales and the appendices to Return of the King assume that you are already familiar with the basic story of The Lord of the Rings – even though they are earlier stories, chronologically. This means that you might run into "spoilers" that would give away things you don't yet know about!
Moreover, there are a lot of references that simply make more sense when you are already familiar with the story of Lord of the Rings. For example, Tolkien might say that someone is "the ancestor of King Elessar", or mention that Oropher is the father of Thranduil and grandfather of Legolas. These references are really cool for readers who already know who these people are....
What if you haven't read the books, but have seen the movies? I would have to again answer "No". The movies omit too many names and details. Reading all of Tolkien's opus in chronological order takes time. If you've seen the movie, I highly recommend you delve immediately into Lord of the Rings (or if you prefer, begin with The Hobbit). If you finish the book and want more, then you might want to do the chronological reading then! Yes, this means you will have to read LotR more than once in your lifetime. If this sounds like a burden, then Chronological Tolkien is certainly not for you!
On the other hand, if you have read Lord of the Rings but haven't yet read The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales, you certainly can use the Chronological Tolkien ordering!
I don't recommend trying this. You could use post-it notes, but they might end up falling off and leaving you really confused.
If you print out the list of jumps and use it as a reference, that might work, but then you would be constantly looking at this paper to see whether you've read too far. If you write the notes in the margins, then you can just relax and read the books as you would any other book.
Of course, you still have to keep the other books handy in case you have to jump to them. You might take a look at the chronological table (see the Gory Details page) to get some idea of what jumps are coming up. Or you might prefer to just read it "blind", without knowing what's next. It's up to you.
I personally prefer trade paperbacks or hardcovers. The smaller paperbacks often have small margins, so it's harder to write the notes there.
But I usually prefer reading trade paperbacks of just about any book, so I may be biased. I just love the new trade paperbacks – the ones with the cool waxy covers, not the movie covers, thank you very much!
If you have an expensive, antique, or illustrated version, you might consider buying a second copy to write the notes in.
I have included all the American editions, including all three different Ballantine paperback editions.
Some of the British and Canadian editions have the same pagination as the American editions. The early British hardcovers (Allen & Unwin) have the same page numbers as the American hardcovers (Houghton-Mifflin). Some of the Harper/Collins paperbacks are identical to the Ballantine editions, but some of them are unique. I don't have any page numbers from the unique Harper/Collins books. But I do have page numbers from one British Silmarillion published by Grafton.
If you have editions I haven't included, please email me. I would like to include them all! I've already received some great information about editions I don't have from Justin Long, Gaynour Sletten, Jérémie Knuesel, and "Nevermore."
In the meanwhile, if you're feeling really industrious you could use the table of book editions (see Gory Details) to convert the Chronological Tolkien system to the page numbers in your books....
I suppose it's odd not to have a timeline on the Science Fiction Timeline Page. But there is already an excellent timeline in Appendix B of Return of the King, and Robert Foster has a timeline of the First Age in The Complete Guide to Middle-earth.
And there are already some really good Tolkien timelines on the web. You can find links to these on the Tolkien Links page.
When J.R.R. Tolkien died, he had completed many of the stories of the Elder Days of Middle-earth. Many others were not yet complete.
His son Christopher assembled the stories and story fragments that had been completed, and released them as The Silmarillion in 1977. He then compiled the stories that had not been completed, and released them as Unfinished Tales in 1980. (The full title of this book is Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth.)
However, some of the stories in Unfinished Tales are actually longer versions of the stories that appear elsewhere. For example, the story of Túrin Turambar in The Silmarillion is almost an outline of the story – Tolkien was expanding it into a major novella but was unable to complete this task. The pieces which he did expand appear in Unfinished Tales, but there are gaps in this story.
Only by using the Chronological Tolkien ordering can you read the complete story of Túrin Turambar. I have woven both tales together into one complete narrative. In some cases, this meant skipping part of the Silmarillion version, because the Unfinished Tales version has the same passage with more details.
In a similar way, Unfinished Tales contains more detailed versions of the story of Tuor, and the story of the alliance between Gondor and Rohan, than are contained in The Silmarillion or in the appendix to The Return of the King. It also contains some stories that can't be found anywhere else.
And while the main focus of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is on the Hobbits, Unfinished Tales contains additional scenes that reveal what Thorin, the Rohirrim, and the Nazgûl were doing when no Hobbits were watching!
How does the new book The Children of Húrin fit into this? Was this book really written by J.R.R. Tolkien?To answer these questions requires that I tell you a story.
When J.R.R. Tolkien passed away in 1973, he had completed two versions of the story of Húrin's children. One was a short, compact version. The other was a much longer and more detailed version -- but unfortunately it was not finished. Tolkien had completed the beginning, and some of the middle and later parts, but there were gaps.
It fell to his son Christopher Tolkien to publish these stories. But which version should he use? At first, he decide he had to use the complete version, even though it was much shorter. In 1977, The Silmarillion was published. The story of Húrin's children became chapter 21 of this book (plus small parts of chapters 20 and 22).
Three years later, Christopher Tolkien released Unfinished Tales. Unlike The Silmarillion, this was not a single, complete work. Rather, it was just what the name implied: a number of incomplete stories. One of the stories in this volume was the incomplete text of the long version of the story of Húrin's children.
This was actually one of the things that inspired me to create the Chronological Tolkien page in the first place. I realized that I could combine these two texts. In the parts of the story where both versions existed, I would read the longer, more detailed version. In the parts of the story where only the short version existed, that one would be read. The result, in my original six-book version of Chronological Tolkien, involved a lot of skipping around, but it was worth it!
In 2007, Christopher Tolkien apparently had the same idea as me. He combined these two stories, using the same method -- keeping the long version where it existed, and using the short version when there was no other alternative. He published this story in a stand-alone volume entitled The Children of Húrin. (No, I'm not saying that he got this idea from me! I doubt that C.T. spends any time on the internet at all -- I hear he dislikes such things. This idea was implicit in Unfinished Tales from the beginning, because in that book C.T. explains how the two versions fit together. In other words, I got the idea from him! But before 2007, my version was the only one available.)
Is The Children of Húrin exactly like my six-book ordering? It's very, very close. As C.T. explains in the postscript, he actually went back to the original manuscripts of his father's, and decided to do less editing than he had in the earlier releases. His father's punctuation and grammar is therefore a bit more accurately reflected in Children than in The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales. But the change is very, very slight. The other difference is that C.T. needed an introduction and a conclusion, and he created these with excerpts from The Silmarillion. Therefore, if you have already read my six-book ordering, there isn't really anything new for you in Children -- except for the beautiful illustrations.
This answers the question of whether Children of Húrin was really written by J.R.R. Tolkien. The answer is yes, and in fact it is slightly truer to his original text in a few places. In fact, it is the published version of The Silmarillion in which Christopher Tolkien altered his father's text the most, because he decided to turn that into a complete work. In the later books, C.T. usually keeps his father's texts intact and adds notes when there are gaps; in The Silmarillion he was forced to fill in the gaps (although only in a few small places).
Why, then, have I updated Chronological Tolkien to include The Children of Húrin? I have two goals with this site. The first is to help people to read the entire saga of Middle Earth in order. (That purpose was already accomplished with the old ordering.) But my second goal is to make it easy for you to do this reading! And by including The Children of Húrin it actually becomes easier to write all the margin notes, because there are now less of them. Most of the story of Húrin's children can now be read in the new book, which means a lot less bouncing back between The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales. You will probably notice that most of chapter 21 of The Silmarillion and the second section of Unfinished Tales are no longer needed in my ordering -- because they are identical to the text of the new book, and thus are not needed. (A few passages from these chapters are still included, because I found a few paragraphs that Christopher decided to cut from Children because they were too tangential to the story. For example, he cut out the explanation of how THúrin Turambar's helmet had originally been created by the Dwarves of Belegost, and I put it back in. We readers of the whole Middle Earth saga want the whole story -- including the tangents!)
Adventures is a book of poetry, and most of these poems are not stories that actually "take place" in Middle-earth. They are, instead, poems written by Hobbits that tell of things that are "imaginary" even to the Middle-earth characters.
The first few poems in this book are about Tom Bombadil, and it's possible that they really are "true" in Tolkien's continuity. But even if that is so, there is absolutely no way to know where they fit into the timeline. Any time after the downfall of Morgoth and before The Fellowship of the Ring is possible.... and that's a six-thousand year interval.
My personal feeling is that Tom Bombadil is not really part of this saga. In fact, the idea of the "River-woman's daughter" doesn't fit into the mythology or physics of Middle-earth at all. But if you would like to add them to the Chronological Tolkien ordering, go ahead!
There are around a dozen new Tolkien books. These have titles and subtitles like The Lost Tales, The History of Middle-earth, The Lost Road, The Shaping of Middle-earth, and The History of the Lord of the Rings.
Many of these books are interesting. But they aren't part of Tolkien's completed world. They are Tolkien's earlier versions of this world. Many of the stories and fragments in these books are not consistent with the completed story, and so they can't be included in a chronological ordering of the Middle-earth saga.
There are a few fragments within these many volumes that could be added, but that would require you to purchase a great number of additional books just to include a few pages of each. For example, the "Epilogue" (Book VI Chapter 11) in Sauron Defeated could be added in. (If you already have this book and want to know where to add it, jump to the Gory Details page and select the Chronological Table.)
Some of the short passages in the appendix to Return of the King are summaries of stories that later appeared in The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales. As long as the entire contents of a passage are duplicated elsewhere, I omitted it.
Similarly, parts of the Túrin Turambar story and the Tuor story in The Silmarillion are redundant with the expanded versions that appear in Unfinished Tales.
Also, I only included stories. For example, the appendices that contain family trees, calendars, and analysis of the languages of Middle-earth are not included. These really are true "appendices" to the story – not stories themselves. (Compare these to "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen", which really is a story, not an "appendix".)
Finally, I didn't include Christopher Tolkien's editorial comments and notes in Unfinished Tales. There were a very small number of these that had to be included (when one of JRRT's stories had a gap and only Christopher could explain what was missing), but these were very few. I have great respect for Christopher Tolkien, but the goal of the Chronological Tolkien project is to read his father's writings!
David Bratman has a different Tolkien ordering system on his webpage. You can jump to his site from the Tolkien Links page.
Mr. Bratman's list differs from the Chronological Tolkien system in two major ways:
First, we include different material. In Mr. Bratman's list, his numbers 3, 8, 9, 15, 16, and 17 do not appear in the Chronological Tolkien ordering. On the other hand, Chronological Tolkien include parts of "Unfinished Tales" and the LotR appendix that Bratman does not include.
Why this difference? J.R.R. Tolkien was constantly revising things. When he died, his son Christopher ended up with many different versions of his tales. He had to choose which of them to bind together as The Silmarillion. His criteria were that he wanted stories that were (1) complete, and (2) as late as possible. So the published Silmarillion includes fairly late versions, but there were some later unfinished versions. Most of these he then published as Unfinished Tales.
Then Christopher began releasing his father's earlier drafts of the stories as the Lost Tales and History of Middle Earth series. These drafts were often very inconsistent with the later versions. Some of them were abandoned by JRRT, and others were re-written, but none eventually met the standards that Christopher set for Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales.
Mr. Bratman is including a few of these stories, while I chose to cut off my ordering at the same place that Christopher Tolkien chose: after Unfinished Tales. In my opinion, these earlier series are analogous to earlier drafts of "Hamlet" – if you plan to study Shakespeare you might want to compare the final version of Hamlet with the earlier drafts, but if you want to read Hamlet for enjoyment you should stick with the finished version.
But this difference is relatively minor – Mr. Bratman's material overlap with Chronological Tolkien by at least 90%.
The bigger difference is this: Chronological Tolkien breaks the stories into much smaller pieces. For example, in Unfinished Tales there is a short piece that describes the Nazgûl's hunt for the Ring, including when they realized Saruman had double-crossed them and how they reached the Shire. In the Chronological Tolkien ordering, this piece is placed in the proper timeline order within Fellowship. Similarly, the Silmarillion contains the story of Turin Turambar, while Unfinished Tales contains some additions to this story; Chronological Tolkien interweaves these stories to create a single narrative. David Bratman lists the individual works but doesn't interweave them in this manner.
Each of these systems has advantages. Chronological Tolkien results in one complete chronological story. On the other hand, Bratman's method is easier to use, because you don't have to flip back and forth between different books.
The best solution would be for Christopher Tolkien to re-edit this material and publish a chronological version of all the stories! But then he would probably have to mix his own prose with his father's, and I suspect that his great respect for his father's work would prevent him from doing that.
(Thanks to Greg Zuschlag for pointing out David Bratman's site to me!)
I never broke up a paragraph. Every section starts at the beginning of a paragraph. And I only made "cuts" at natural breaking points – places where you could jump in and understand what's going on.
That's why this is a Reading Order, not a Timeline. The goal was to come up with a sequence that was in chronological order, but completely readable.
There are places in the Appendix to Return of the King when my sections are just one or two paragraphs.... because these places record the annals of kings, and each paragraph tells about a king in a different century. On the other hand, some sections are more than 200 pages long.
If you want to see all the individual sections and how they fit together, take a look at the Gory Details page.
When Syme went out into the starlit street, he found it for the moment empty. Then he realized (in some odd way) that the silence was rather a living silence than a dead one. Directly outside the door stood a street lamp, whose gleam gilded the leaves of the tree that bent out over the fence behind him. About a foot from the lamp-post stood a figure almost as rigid and motionless as the lamp-post itself. The tall hat and long frock-coat were black; the face, in an abrupt shadow, was almost as dark. Only a fringe of fiery hair against the light, and also something aggressive in the attitude, proclaimed that it was the poet Gregory. He had something of the look of a masked bravo waiting sword in hand for his foe.
He made a sort of doubtful salute, which Syme somewhat more formally returned.
‘I was waiting for you,’ said Gregory. ‘Might I have a moment's conversation?’
‘Certainly. About what?’ asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.
Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the tree.
‘About this and this,’ he cried; ‘about order and anarchy. There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself – there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold.’
‘All the same,’ replied Syme patiently, ‘just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree....’
G.K. Chesterton
The Man Who Was Thursday
Chronological Tolkien . . . . . Reading Order FAQ
Updated 17 January 2008 by Larry King
Back to the Chronological Tolkien Page 
Home to the Science Fiction Timeline Site 
