To begin with I’m shocked how much I liked this. If you’re a Lord of the Rings fan, and especially if you’re friends with an extra intense fan, you almost certainly know about this book. Within what you know, probably infamy? As in, this is an infamously dull book that even hardcore fans typically don’t recommend. The style is dry, the language plodding, and the family trees extensive. But, if you’ve ever asked yourself in earnest, “so who tf is Gandalf really and why does he come back from the dead?” Or, “so how does the One Ring have power over the others really?” Then first off let me welcome you to this tier of nerddom, and second this is the book for you.
I suspect the reason I like this so much is its similarity to watching Dark Souls lore videos, which occupies a lot of my time. It has a similarly speculative feeling in places, such as the death of Ungoliant (super big spider, Shelob’s mother, if you need to know more than that it’s on you to find it) being unclear, with her potentially still skulking about somewhere in Middle Earth. This is meant to have the feeling of not just myth, but distant myth, with the feeling of something that’s transcribed long after the fact from songs and poems.
I really don’t know what else to say because this is such familiar territory that you may have never heard of it, but you definitely have heard some elements of it through alternative sources. I recommend it for deep fans of Lord of the Rings, but otherwise it’s a pretty esoteric set of stories and either won’t make sense or will confuse people. All that said, I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected.