Sep 20, 2026 · 1 hr 56 min · 19 segments
Christopher Tolkien believes that the book he was working on was “in no conceivable way publishable”. Alan and Sara sometimes think the same about the podcast. Join The Man of the West and The…
We're gonna go ahead and get into the book, but before we begin looking at the preface for this volume, I wanna look at where it fits within the timeline of all the books that Christopher edited and published after the professor's death in 1973.
And as just a kind of coincidental side note, through the vagaries of scheduling and the fact that we've had to redo some things, we're actually recording this on the anniversary of his death on September 2nd, so that feels really fitting, doesn't it?
It really does.
Raising a glass and toasting the professor-
... to whom we owe so much.
So of course, many of you know that in 1977, four years after the professor's death, Christopher published The Silmarillion, and that book did contain a very sizable prose version of the story that we'll be covering at length this entire season.
Yep.
Then three years later, in 1980, he published Unfinished Tales, which of course we spent all of last season covering-
... along with some parts of season nine.
Uh, and then from 1983 through 1996, Christopher then published the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth.
I have no idea how he did it.
Yeah.
Well, highly complicated apart from-
We're gonna go ahead and get into the book, but before we begin looking at the preface for this volume, I wanna look at where it fits within the timeline of all the books that Christopher edited and published after the professor's death in 1973.
And as just a kind of coincidental side note, through the vagaries of scheduling and the fact that we've had to redo some things, we're actually recording this on the anniversary of his death on September 2nd, so that feels really fitting, doesn't it?
It really does.
Raising a glass and toasting the professor-
... to whom we owe so much.
So of course, many of you know that in 1977, four years after the professor's death, Christopher published The Silmarillion, and that book did contain a very sizable prose version of the story that we'll be covering at length this entire season.
Yep.
Then three years later, in 1980, he published Unfinished Tales, which of course we spent all of last season covering-
... along with some parts of season nine.
Uh, and then from 1983 through 1996, Christopher then published the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth.
I have no idea how he did it.
Yeah.
Well, highly complicated apart from-
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