Beren and Lúthien: Erin Summerill

I, like some other reviewers, thought this was a continuous work like 'The Children of Hurin'. It's not. I'd be embarrassed at my mistake, were it not for the first line of the description that states 'Painstakingly restored from Tolkien’s manuscripts and presented for the first time as a fully continuous and standalone story'...How is that not a complete misrepresentation of what this is? It may be a worthy piece of literary research, but it's not a novel as that description suggests.

This review is for the Beren and Luthien deluxe edition.It's a beautiful book. Had to get a replacement as the first one had a chip of the gold embossing missing, so make sure that you check yours for defects. You don't want to pay £40-60 for a book for such blemishes.Regarding this book, only buy it if you know what you're getting to. If you just want the story of Beren and Luthien, it's covered in the Silmarillion. This book covers various versions of the same story and is not a single novel such as the Hobbit or Lord of hte Rings.

There is a world of difference between a LOTR fan and a Tolkien reader. The later enjoy the trawling through different versions and name changes of characters, half hinted plot lines, alternative origins and so on. The pleasure of Tolkien lies not just in the finished article, but in it's slow evolution, the changing bones of the ox.This book is for Tolkien fans. If you enjoyed The Silmarillion, better still The unfinished tales, and especially if you stuck with the History Of Middle Earth, then this will be a wonderful addition to your collection.

This book is a mess. It fails, in all regards and in odd ways. Not because of the content that makes it up (which varies a lot) but the way it all comes together.As a piece of literature it fails (as I expected it to) in that it doesn't live up to the high bar set by the excellent Children of Hurin. This has no real cohesive narrative that begs interest to a general reader at all, in my opinion. For that - read The SilmarillionThis also fails as a study piece, which is what it is really, granted, because it's incomplete. In the same breath however, this whole book also feels unnecessary and that's why the low rating. - For this read The Book of Lost Tales and The Lays of Beleriand.This book follows the development of the Tale of Beren & Luthien through the years and various iterations. It is missing the final version of the story, which was published in the Silmarillion, to make it a valid completist effort; but the material that is included is all present in the books of The History of Middle Earth. This leads to a compendium of material that fails to satisfy either need, I feel.There was an opportunity here to do something different with the material, to make it more relatable and accessible with good editing but no, true to form CT fails to change a thing which, while admirable in HOME, would have been welcome here to create a different viewpoint on the stories at least. Just updating the names to stop confusion through the iterations would have been helpful. While keeping them as is chronologically in HOME made sense, viewing the changes thematically is made much harder by this approach here.I rarely regret a book purchase, but this would definitely go on the list. Its sole saving grace for me is the artwork, which is beautiful. Beyond that this book is largely pointless.I would recommend reading the other books listed in this review as a better approach than this.

I had been waiting for this to release for a very long time! Great to see the development of the story, particularly of characters such as Tevildo and his cats. Enjoyed the commentary by Christopher Tolkien who, at the age of 92, has done a fantastic job of compiling even more of his father's drafts and re-writes into another splendid publicationAs always. beautiful colour artwork from Alan Lee throughout with a lovely illustrated dust jacket.

Four stars only, unfortunately. And I never expected to say that about any book with J.R.R. Tolkien's name on it.The book is broken.When I picked up and opened my first copy of The Hobbit, at age eleven, the storyteller took control of my imagination and took me to the home country of the Hobbits, to the home of Bilbo Baggins esq., Introducing me to his worthy self. Then the storyteller introduced me to the wiley Gandalf, and then to thirteen gruff and often grumpy Dwarfs.After this the storyteller took me on a journey across a large swath of northern Middle-earth, through the rocky wooded wastelands to Rivendell, then over (and under) the barren, rocky Misty Mountains to a humongous forest full of huge spiders and gay elves feasting, to a large cold lake on the cusp of Winter, to a lonely dragon ravaged mountain. And on to the end of the story.The storyteller was able to do so because he did his job well. His voice, which sounds so much like the voice in my head (no jokes, now!) guided me safely through so many situations totally unknown to my eleven year old mind. He introduced me to Dwarfs, and not Snow-white's friends (though there are similarities), to tall wise Elves, ugly, brutish Gobblins, great, tall, powerful men who can turn themselves into huge bears, tall, slim woodland Elves, rafts made out of roped-together (supposedly empty) barrels, men that lived in a town built on stilts above a lake, and eventually to a cunning, greedy fire drake . . . and then all the way back to an auction.The storyteller was able to do all that because he was clever, artful, had an amazing talent for describing things using nothing but words, and because he did everything in one homogeneous style.By the time I had read Beren and Lúthien, I knew the story from beginning to end, but it wasn't effortless, as with The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings. In this book there are at least three completely different writing styles. The main story of Beren and Lúthien is written in Tolkien's storytelling prose, but inserted in the story, as a continuation of the story, are hundreds and hundreds of lines from Tolkien's Lay of Leithien, a poem, in at least three sections, the last section being 72 pages long.What I wanted was the story, instead I got a broken book glued together with pieces from other books.