An Encyclopedia of Tolkien: The History and Mythology That Inspired Tolkien's World

By David Day

A comprehensive, illustrated guide to the history, lands, and inhabitants of Middle-earth.

The fantasy world of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth contains a rich assortment of people, cities, and creatures, as well as a deep, intertwined history that spans thousands of years. In this beautifully illustrated volume, bestselling author and Tolkien scholar David Day presents four decades of research and writing on the lands and inhabitants Middle-earth. Sections of this A-to-Z reference book are devoted to discussion of the battles, history, beasts, and heroes of Tolkien’s stories. This comprehensive volume on Tolkien’s world also includes an appendix of three primary legends that served as sources for Tolkien’s creations—the Volsunga saga, the Nibelungenlied, and Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle—and more than 200 black-and-white illustrations.

This work is unofficial and is not authorized by the Tolkien Estate or HarperCollins Publishers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781645170105

David Day

David Day is a bestselling and prize-winning biographer and historian, several of whose books have been published to acclaim in the United States and Britain and have been translated into numerous languages. Among his many academic posts, David Day has been a junior research fellow at Clare College in Cambridge, a by-fellow at Churchill College in Cambridge, and a visiting fellow at the University of Aberdeen and the Australian National University. He spent three years as a visiting professor at University College, Dublin, and two years at the University of Tokyo. He is currently an honorary associate in the history program at La Trobe University. Maurice Blackburn: champion of the people is his twentieth book.

Reviews for An Encyclopedia of Tolkien

[darthdeverell · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

David Day’s An Atlas of Tolkien builds upon the work he began in his Tolkien Bestiary to work as a guidebook to J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium. Though Day describes events from The Silmarillion through The Hobbit and finally Lord of the Rings, he does so only as necessary to explain matters of time and space in describing locations. Like his previous work, Day commissioned artists to create paintings illustrating Tolkien’s world. The volume works well as a companion and guide to Tolkien’s work, particularly as a reference for those looking to keep track of events during The Silmarillion or to refresh their memories about those events in Lord of the Rings which reference The Silmarillion. The contributing artists – Ivan Allen, John Blanche, Sally Davies, Michael Foreman, Linda Garland, Melvin Grant, David Kearney, Ian Miller, Andrew Mockett, Lidia Postma, and others – imbue the work with visual references as epic as the texts that inspired them while giving distinctive styles to each of the places and events in question. Day’s Atlas of Tolkien succeeds as a guidebook for fans while the binding of this edition gives it the appearance of a work that could exist in-universe.

[walterhistory · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

David Day's Atlas of Tolkein is really an impressive collection of art work in a compacted retelling of the creation & development of Tolkein's imaginary world. The author points out that the book is more about the retelling of the shaping & reshaping of Tolkein's Middle Earth through the eyes of the artist. As the reader surveys the work, it is exactly that. If you are expecting the retelling of the Tolkein stories, you will need to read the stories elsewhere. Here is a good addition to the Tolkein literature which will enhance, from an artistic view, the reader's interest in the Tolkein genre.

[benkline · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Finished this at work today for my first book of 2017 (challenge this year is 90 books, instead of last year's 85, which means about a book every 4 days).

The illustrations in this are wonderful. The atlas-maps though aren't quite so good, but there is plenty of interesting content. It's presented chronologically, but by the War of the Ring, there is a lot less emphasis on the maps/world and much more emphasis on everything middle-earth by that point. Wish there were more maps of the War of the Ring era rather than just info-blurbs and drawings (of characters/battles). Still a wonderful companion piece to LOTR/Simarillion/Hobbit/etc.

[stormraven_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Suppose you wanted to have an understanding of the mythology Tolkien fabricated as the background to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings but found The Silmarillion and the Histories of Middle-Earth too dense for your liking, what could you do? Well, one option would be to read David Day's Atlas of Tolkien, which encapsulates pretty much the entire history of the fantasy world and provides some fantastic artwork to help illustrate its beauty.In one sense, An Atlas of Tolkien is kind of like a Cliff's Notes version of Tolkien's fiction, summarizing the course of its invented history from the moment that Eru first awakened the Valar and had them sing the world into existence, through the wars against Morgoroth, the creation, theft, and eventual recovery of the Silmarils and the cataclysmic War of Wrath, the rise and fall of Numenore, the battles against Sauron, the forging of the Rings, and finally the events found in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, all contained in a mere 236 pages. From a certain perspective, this comparison is not entirely fair, because Cliff's Notes versions of books are usually vacuous affairs that strip out all of the heart and soul of a book. By contrast, even though An Atlas of Tolkien offers a summarized version of the events of Tolkien's fictional history, it does so in a manner that at least attempts to retain some of the imagery and poetry of the original.One area that An Atlas of Tolkien shines is in the artwork contained in its pages. Day's illustrations are quirky and beautiful, presenting a version of Arda that is uniquely his, and yet captures the essence of Tolkien as well. Much of the artwork is recycled from earlier works by David Day, such as his Tolkien Bestiary, so a reader who has read that book will find much of what appears in this one to be familiar. There is some new artwork, although such original pieces are a relatively small fraction of the total that are found in the book. Even so, the artwork is as beautiful this time around as it was the first time it appeared in a book by David Day, so the reader is unlikely to be disappointed on this front. Oddly, for a book that is described as an atlas, the maps are by and large mediocre at best, providing a reasonably accurate depiction of the region highlighted, but doing so in an uninspired, dull, and frequently almost featureless manner. In comparison to the illustrations, the maps seem almost like they were mailed in, with only passing attention given to their creation and execution. Fortunately (or unfortunately), actual maps are few and far between in this volume, so their perfunctory seeming nature doesn't encroach on the book too much.[More forthcoming]