In the Tale of THE FALL OF GONDOLIN are two of the greatest powers in the world. There is Morgoth of the uttermost evil, unseen in this story but ruling over a vast military power from his fortress of Angband. Deeply opposed to Morgoth is Ulmo, second in might only to Manwë, chief of the Valar: he is called the Lord of Waters, of all seas, lakes and rivers under the sky. But he works in secret in Middle-earth to support the Noldor, the kindred of the Elves among whom were numbered Húrin and Túrin Turambar. Central to this enmity of the gods is the city of Gondolin, beautiful but undiscoverable.

The epic tale of Beren and Lúthien became an essential element in the evolution of The Silmarillion, the myths and legends of J.R.R. Tolkien’s First Age of the World. Always key to the story is the fate that shadowed their love: Beren was a mortal man, Lúthien an immortal Elf. Her father, a great Elvish lord, imposed on Beren an impossible task before he might wed Lúthien: to rob the greatest of all evil beings, Melkor, of a Silmaril. Painstakingly restored from Tolkien’s manuscripts and presented for the first time as a continuous and stand-alone story, BEREN AND LÚTHIEN reunites fans of THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS with Elves and Men, along with the rich landscape and creatures unique to Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

The translation of BEOWULF by J. R. R. Tolkien was an early work, very distinctive in its mode, completed in 1926: he returned to it later to make hasty corrections, but seemed never to have considered its publication. This edition is twofold, for there exists an illuminating commentary on the text of the poem by the translator himself, in the written form of a series of lectures given at Oxford in the 1930s; and from these lectures a substantial selection has been made, to also form a commentary on the translation in this book.

THE FALL OF ARTHUR, the only venture by J.R.R. Tolkien into the legends of Arthur King of Britain, may well be regarded as his finest and most skillful achievement in the use of the Old English alliterative metre. Unhappily, it was one of several long narrative poems that he abandoned. Associated with the text of the poem, however, are many manuscript pages in which the strange evolution of the poem’s structure is revealed, together with narrative synopses and very significant notes.