Notes
The Peoples of Middle-earth, a collection of writings by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited with foreword, commentary and index by Christopher Tolkien.

Volume 12 of the The History of Middle-earth series.

Published on 2 September 1996.

A manuscript page, various family trees and a calendar originally drawn by J.R.R. Tolkien and re-drawn for publication by Christopher Tolkien appear as a frontispiece and on pages 89-92, 95-97, 100-101, 104-105, 109-111, 114-116, 134, 221 and 277.

Details of all British editions of The Peoples of Middle-earth can be found at TolkienBooks.net.

Blurb – Dust Jacket Flap
When J.R.R. Tolkien laid aside The Silmarillion in 1937 the extension of the original ‘mythology’ into later Ages of the world had scarcely emerged, if it had emerged at all; as he himself recorded, he knew nothing of the peoples and history of these Ages until he ‘met them on the way’: ‘The Mines of Moria had been a mere name and of Lothlórien no word had reached my mortal ears until I came there. Fangorn Forest was an unforeseen adventure. I had never heard of the House of Eorl nor the stewards of Gondor. Saruman had never been revealed to me.’

It was in the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings that there emerged a comprehensive historical structure and chronology of the Second and Third Ages, embracing all the diverse strands that came together in the War of the Ring. The difficulty bordering on despair that he found in providing these Appendices, leading to delay in the publication of The Return of the King, is well known; but in The Peoples of Middle-earth Christopher Tolkien shows that the work had in fact been achieved years before, in essays and records differing greatly from the published forms. In these early texts is seen the evolution of the chronology of the later Ages, the Calendars, the Hobbit genealogies (with those of families that were printed but not published), and the Westron language or Common Speech (from which many words and names are recorded that were afterwards lost).

Following the account of the Appendices a number of other writings by J.R.R. Tolkien are included in this book, chiefly deriving from his last years, when new insights and new constructions still freely arose as he pondered the history that he had created.

This final volume of The History of Middle-earth concludes with two soon-abandoned stories, both unique in the setting of time or place: The New Shadow in Gondor of the Fourth Age, and the tale of Tal-Elmar, in which the coming of the dreaded Númenorean ships is seen through the eyes of men of Middle-earth in the Dark Years.