The Shaping of Middle-Earth

This is the fourth book in the History of Middle Earth series. This book gives us the early development of Tolkien's thoughts on The Silmarillion. At this point in time, Tolkien was moving away from the framework he used in The Lost Tales. It still contains the same mythology but is being constructed and rewritten differently. Once again, I followed along with The Tolkien Professor's analysis to help me understand the text and commentary. As I progress through the series, the stories are becoming very familiar. It's the commentary that's much drier. Christopher Tolkien spends most of his time detailing the evolution of the names as well as pointing out the detailed differences between all the versions of the stories from The Lost Tales up to the '30s, when much of this text was written. I still find all this fascinating even though it is often dry as dust.

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