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Updated to include The Children of Húrin.
Have you ever said, "I love reading Tolkien's tales of Middle-earth, but I just wish there were a way to read them in chronological order?" If so, you're not alone. According to a recent survey, 87% of people in the English-speaking world have the same wish.*
Now this wish is fulfilled – through the Chronological Tolkien system!
Grab your copies of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth saga – The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The Children of Húrin, The Hobbit, and the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings. Write a few notes in the margins of these books. Then turn off your computer (!), open up the first book, and start reading. The margin notes will tell you when to skip to a new section.
And then you can read Tolkien's entire masterpiece.... beginning with the creation of the world.... and ending when the stories of the Elder Days are preserved in the Red Book of Westmarch by the descendants of Merry and Pippin.
To set up the margin notes for the Chronological Tolkien system, just use the Reading Order Calculator!
The Reading Order Calculator is all you need to set up the Chronological Tolkien system for your books.
If you have questions about why these seven books were chosen, or which editions are best suited to this system, or whether Chronological Tolkien is for you, take a look at the Reading Order FAQ.
If you are curious about all the grungy technical details of the Chronological Tolkien system, you might want to take a look at the Gory Details of how this system was assembled.
If you want to use the old Reading Order Calculator -- which doesn't include The Children of Húrin -- you can still find it here. The new book really didn't add much new material, because 97% of it is material that already appeared in The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales. However, if you do include Children of Húrin, it means you have fewer notes to write in the margin. For more details on this, see the FAQ.
Finally, if you aren't interested in reading Tolkien right now, but just just want to continue web-surfing, check out our Tolkien Links page!
All names, places, dates, and excerpts from The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings are copyright 1937-2008 by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, the J. R. R. Tolkien Estate Ltd, Christopher R. Tolkien, Michael H. R. Tolkien, Fr. John F. R. Tolkien, and Priscilla M. A. R. Tolkien. The photostatic excerpt from Unfinished Tales is © 1980-2008 by Houghton-Mifflin Company.
The Quenya translation of the Lord's Prayer is by J. R. R. Tolkien, and is taken from Vinyar Tengwar, January 2002, edited by Carl F. Hostetter and Patrick Wynne.
The details of the Chronological Tolkien ordering were worked out by Larry King. The dating of the First Age is based on the dates used by Robert Foster in The Complete Guide to Middle-earth, although this work doesn't take Unfinished Tales into account and therefore has some small inaccuracies.
Michel Daw, Steve Derfel, Joy Pitman, Justin Long, Hector Turner, and Gaynour Sletten provided some excellent assistance. All HTML and DHTML coding was done by Larry King, who continued his absurd and unwise practice of writing the build routines in C instead of Perl.
* This survey was conducted with the exacting standards established by The Onion, so its accuracy cannot be doubted.
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