Gory Details

I included as many editions as I could find, but there are several that I haven't been able to get my hands on yet. For a full list of the editions I have, and the page numbers of each section, see the following table:

Edition List

This Edition List includes the sections used in the current seven-book ordering, as well as the old six-book ordering (without The Children of Húrin). It also lists the sections which I are not included in these reading sequences.

When calculating page numbers, it isn't possible to simply scale the pages from one book to another – this will get you fairly close to the new page number, but won't hit it exactly. So I had to examine each edition included in Chronological Tolkien.

The following table shows the whole reading sequence in chronological order:

Chronological Table

Here is the same table using the old six-book lineup:

Chronological Table (6-book version)

Notice that the six-book lineup actually had a larger number of sections, because The Children of Húrin did some of my work for me, combining a number of sections from The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales that I needed to combined manually in the original six-book ordering (see the FAQ for an explanation).

These table also includes the dates for each section. In a few cases these dates are ranges which overlap. This is because it was crucial that the Chronological Tolkien order be readable – and readability had to take precedence over strict chronological ordering.

Chronological Tolkien . . . . . Gory Details
Updated 9 April 2008 by Larry King

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