The Complete Guide to Middle-earth
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The Complete Guide to Middle-earth: from The Hobbit to The Silmarillion is a reference book for J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional universe of Middle-earth, compiled and edited by Robert Foster. It was first published in 1971 under the title A Guide to Middle-earth. A revised and enlarged edition under the title The Complete Guide to Middle-earth was published in 1978. It received a third edition in 2001.
AuthorEdit
Robert Foster (b. 1949, Brooklyn) earned a Ph.D. in English and Medieval Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and taught subsequently in the English Department at Rutgers University.<ref name="alibris">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="loc">Template:Cite book</ref> Foster begun work on this in the late sixties, consulting Tolkien works and letters.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite journal</ref>
A Guide to Middle-earthEdit
The 1971 A Guide to Middle-earth was the first published encyclopedic reference book for the fictional universe of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, compiled and edited by Robert Foster.<ref name=":0"/> The book was published in 1971 by Mirage Press, a specialist science fiction and fantasy publisher, in a limited edition.<ref name=":0"/> A paperback edition was issued by Ballantine Books in 1974.Template:Sfn
The author profile in the first edition describes Robert Foster as the then-"Tengwar Consultant" to the Tolkien Society of America.<ref>Complete Guide, author profile</ref> The book incorporates material previously published in the science fiction fanzine Niekas.<ref name=":0"/>
The Complete Guide to Middle-earthEdit
The Complete Guide to Middle-earth, published in 1978 was a major expansion of A Guide to Middle-earth, at almost twice its length, with coverage of The Silmarillion, which came out in 1977.Template:Sfn However, as it does not include information on post-Silmarillion material (i.e. Unfinished Tales and the history of composition series The History of Middle-earth), the 1978 edition contains some assertions supported by later publications, and some that are contradicted. For example, the Star of Elendil jewel (the Elendilmir) is identified with the Star of the Dúnedain given to Samwise Gamgee, something refuted by Christopher Tolkien.Template:Sfn On the other hand, Foster proposes that Gandalf and Olórin are one and the same; this is stated directly by Gandalf in The Two Towers.Template:Sfn
A revised edition (Template:ISBN) was published in 2001, in time for Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.<ref name=":0"/>
A new hardback edition illustrated by Ted Nasmith, including standard and slipcased versions, was released in September 2022.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="Roberts 2022">Template:Cite news</ref>
ReceptionEdit
Early editions of The Complete Guide to Middle-earth have been widely recognised as providing an excellent reference on Middle-earth.Template:Sfn Lester del Rey praised the 1971 version for covering "literally everything you wanted to know about Middle Earth and were unable to discover before."<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Christopher Tolkien commended it in 1980 as an "admirable work of reference".Template:Sfn in 2002, Charles W. Nelson, author of A Tolkien Bestiary, wrote that the guide was helpful for Tolkien students and enthusiasts, each new edition being a noticeable improvement over its predecessors in terms of comprehensiveness.<ref name=":0"/>
Dissenting, Adam Roberts, writing in The Times in 2022, calls the revised edition disappointing and "woefully outdated" in the face of the wealth of information on Tolkien now available on the Internet.<ref name="Roberts 2022"/>
TranslationsEdit
A Polish edition, Encyklopedia Śródziemia, was published in 1998, and reprinted in 2002, 2003 and 2012.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> A German edition, Das Große Mittelerde-Lexikon, revised and translated by Helmut W. Pesch, was published in 2002.Template:Sfn
ReferencesEdit
SourcesEdit
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