Day does an excellent job of explicating some of the intricacies of Tolkien's world, particularly the convoluted mythology of The Silmarillion. I'm not a big fan of the artwork in this book, though, which makes the whole thing only halfway successful for me.

It's not very useful as a reference material because the same subject will have multiple entries but no cross-references within entries. I'd recommend Foster's Guide to Middle-Earth if you want a book to actually look up stuff in.

That being said, this was really fun to read and had really excellent illustrations.

This got three stars mostly because I love Tolkien in an irrepressible, nostalgic way. Frankly, this is not a high-quality encyclopedia. I thought the entries were organized and linked poorly. Day should have made better use of some sort of "See Also" tag to make navigation easier. In addition, the map was incomplete (I can't tell you how many times I scoured the map for a location listed in the text only to be disappointed), and the timelines were confusing. The writing style was your typical, overblown, inverted-sentence-structure, high-fantasy silliness. The illustrations were hit or miss. But I just love reading about elves and dwarves and ents, so I still enjoyed reading this.

Fun collection to flip-through, and not nearly as much content that was seemingly pulled out of thin air (as is the case in most of his other books I've read parts of).

Still be sure to double check that the information you're grabbing is cited elsewhere before you go using as fact though!

Tolkien's world of Middle Earth introduces us to all kinds of creatures that are unfamiliar to us. Some we may have encountered in other stories -- elves, dwarves and goblins are found in many different fairy stories and fantasy novels, but hobbits, ents and balrogs are not. But even the ones whose names we know play a different role in Tolkien's stories. They have their own history, culture and languages.

This book is a kind of encyclopaedia of such creatures.

I've returned it to the library now, but I rather wish i had it for reference. Tolkien's books are full of allusions to tales, myths and legends of his world, but paging through other stories to find them can be quite challenging. Here they are all packed between the same covers.

Do you want to know the history of elves, and which ones saw the light of the two trees and which ones didn't? A quick lookup in this book will tell you.

Do you want to know about the relationship between Shelob and Ungoliant? It's all here.

And I found that just reading through it as if each entry was a chapter in a book helped me to recall some of the stories. It's a kind of mental map to the peoples and creatures of middle earth.

I just can't remember whether it said balrogs have wings or not. That's why I'd like my own copy.

This is basically a Tolkien dictionary.

An A-Z guide of people, place, animals, plants and creatures from middle-earth - describing who or what they are and, in some cases, their life story.

The illustrations alongside some of the entries were amazing (except you Frodo, yours was terrifying and didn't accurately represent you at all in my mind - but hey, it's the artists in interpretation).

The only problem was information was repeated, a lot, and I felt that this could have been cut down if there was cross over by stating *see this entry for more detail*.

Handy when you want to know something about middle earth. :D

This book is more an encyclopaedia than a bestiary, since it covers various peoples and even individuals as well as races and creatures. The art is lovely, not necessarily what I would associate with Tolkien, but strong and beautiful nonetheless. There are line drawings spread throughout, pretty much on every page, and there are a number of colour page spreads clustered in a few areas as well. It's pretty comprehensive, using all of Tolkien's primary works of Arda, and with an index to primary sources at the back as well as a general index of the book itself.

Parts of it did make for rather uneasy reading, though, generally where races of men other than the Edain/Númenóreans were mentioned, as they were inevitable dark skinned and either evil in and of themselves or under the sway of Melkor/Sauron. This is something that may be easier to ignore in [b: The Lord of the Rings|33|The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3)|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1547450792s/33.jpg|3462456], as they come up less, but in a book about races, it's rather more stark. This doesn't stop me from loving either book, but it's a reminder of the world that Tolkien grew up in and the cultural shorthands he took for granted.

But looking beyond that, it's a gorgeous book, impeccably researched and illustrated that deserves a place on the bookshelf of every Tolkien fan.