I'm reading reviews from amazon and some are saying if you own the silmarillion or some other books you don't need this one. And also that this one has incomplete stories. Have you read it yet and confirm this?

Where would you place this in your reading order between which books?

Damn right

Not Hildebrandt? /s

Brothers Hildebrandt, man. Sheesh....

Uh both those events are in the same age. The reshaping of arda and the war of the last alliance are in the second age

@@historicdude7996 that’s the point he’s making

@@bnasty5614 oh wait my bad i totally misread it

Uh? Tolkien defined the ages in function of the enemies of the middle earth. The first age ended with Morgoth being thrown into the void and the second age begun with the fall of Numenor (caused by Sauron) and ended with his defeat.

Are they, except the Valar and their followers, awared of the reshaping of Arda?

We do have a new officially licensed canon courtesy of the Tolkien estate and Amazon. It’s becoming Star Wars in that way

@@FlynntheHuman602 The film series and tv show are their own thing; separate and an adaptation of the Tolkien legendarium. They don't somehow overwrite the cannon of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It's a nice courtesy that the Amazon show tries to stay compatible (from a lore and production design standpoint) with the the New Line film series; it's nice for casual fans who may only have watched Middle-Earth stuff. But for licensing reasons, Amazon's adaptation is separate from New Line's adaptation, which is separate from the original Tolkien legendarium. Of course if we want to split hairs, the only "Official Canon" is The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The unfinished works that make up the rest of the legendarium are not internally consistent, as we all well know. Heck, Lord of the Rings wasn't even internally consistent with The Hobbit when it was published, which is why the Hobbit was slightly rewritten for later publications.

@@Doug_Hannon to be honest rings of power doesn’t even stick with the films cannon. Like I would totally get if they just went off the movies for the more casual viewer, but they completely ignored everything, except when trying to get people to recognise elements of the movie trilogy(obviously written greatly inferior) and the books. No clue what rings of power is actually based on apart from being it’s own universe of a badly written unwatchable mess.

​@@FlynntheHuman602 what's with people's obsession with cannon and non-cannon material? Its so creatively limiting.

@@beeeeeesbury I mean we can just ask if it’s good and Rings if Power misses on that one too. If they wanted to be creatively unlimited they would invent a world and characters of their own and make it somehow interesting to watch E: honestly, I don’t understand the new obsession with buying out big franchises to use the characters as action figures for random scripts. Especially with material that has never been made into this medium before

Tolkien stated that not only did he consider the culture of the Hobbits to be superior to all others in the Third Age of Middle Earth, but also that the Hobbits, partially because of their culture, were also uniquely capable of resisting and healing from the effects of evil. He was also a professor of linguistics, with a focus on old English, a field with notoriously unreliable and spotty records for reference. I think it’s kind of funny how he slips a preference for particularly accurate and factual reference books into his ideal society.

How were the footnotes and chapter notes dealt with in the audiobooks? Or were those just ignored?

@@spangelicious837 In the books I mentioned, the text by Tolkien was read by Samuel West, while all the editorial notes were read by his father, Timothy West. As I understand it, something similar is happening with this book.

@@adpirtle Interesting. Thanks! I've always passed on the audios because I couldn't imagine how they'd be able to handle all those notes and keep it from being confusing. Do they interrupt the text to read the notes as they're numbered in the book, or read the notes all at the end?

@@spangelicious837 They often pause the text to read notes. That's why it helps that there are two narrators. It keeps it from being too confusing.

@@adpirtle Thanks! I think I'll stick to the books then. I prefer to read the notes when it's convenient to me.

I'd love that, because I find the war against the witch-king a really interesting topic. Also, I'd love to see Alan Lee's illustrations for that book.

You think that the fall of armor could be a possible nother book

It would be a pretty cool triple set to have on a bookshelf. 1) The Fall of Gondolin 2) The Fall of Numenor 3) The Fall of Arnor

Fall of Arnor would be great! I hope there are enough writings from Tolkien for a new book.

The Fall of Arnor could/would be cool, though I believe its covered enough within the appendices of LotR. You never know, though!

i second that

Please do this!

This would be fantastic

At least the colour artwork in David Day's books isn't just shades of grey.

@@frankshailes3205 Yes!

How original.

I love how they managed to show us the inner workings of the best immortal craftsmen in the world. I’m sure Tolkien kept that a mystery because he didn’t have the depth of mind to suggest more than one alloy be combined. Modern day smiths could learn from this show!

@@kingkai1763 he was not aware that the metals needed to coaxed together. Thankfully tictok videos show modern smiths how to do it properly.

That was my favorite part

@@magnificus8581 I would not have been shocked if Halbrand had whipped out an iPhone and scrolled through a bunch of twerking girls to show Celebrimbor a 20 second smithing video on tik tok

So a while back, I discovered you can just order from Amazon UK rather than Amazon US. It's great for buying unadulterated versions of books written by UK authors. IDK why, but American publishers insist on Americanizing books for the US market. You can also sometimes get books before they're released in the US.

Can't stop won't stop

The Silmarillion should have the last 2 chapters removed, focusing on the silmarils. And they could make a single book just for ainulindale and valaquenta, Full of illustrations more than any other (like Hp by Jim Kay), and there could also be one for the 3 age (before the Hobbit, and between the Hobbit and lotr). And one for everything after the 3 age

That’s exactly what I thought when I read Unfinished Tales and later The Nature of Middle-Earth. There should be a revised version of the Silmarillion, since many things changed in Tolkien’s later writings.

The problem with doing this is that there’s just too many times Tolkien changed his mind. Many of his final thoughts contradict the rest of the story he had already written and didn’t have time to change. It would be almost impossible without such a published work seeming like a fan fiction piecing his contradictions together and making them make sense. Gil-Galad’s backstory alone amplifies this problem, as well as the problem of Sauron setting aside/carrying his ring from Numenor (which one is it!?) Fan-fiction is fine, I guess, but then others would have their complaints about which of their favorite versions of the stories were left out. 🤷‍♀️

@@mrs.manrique7411 Yeah there is no *final* version because he never wrote one

That's why I'm not watching this video and just perusing the comments while listening. I don't want electronic viewing spoilers. Also my laptop doesn't smell anything like a book.

And they did let you know what that is actually called 🙃

According to Wikipedia, the ribbon is called a bookmark: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookmark. I know, it’s not what I was expecting either.

🤭me too🤍

@@LaughThruLife yea 🤭🤗😁😘💜

Hahaha I was thinking the same!

So…freaking…good.

Anything Tolkien is wasted on Amazon.

i sincerely hope amazon gets a restraining order for anything tolkien related.

I'm always confused by people who don't want the adaptors to get the rights to use the source material and then complain about it not being lore accurate.

Sauron's wacky adventures in Mordor

I think he opened the door from the inside, which is easy.

@@Manuel73618 I just reacted to something said in the video. That the doors were never opened until the fellowship came.

@@haraldkjall4561 The doors were easy to open from inside but they couldn't be seen from the outside or physically opened from the outside.

I would think more the other way around as most of The Silmarillion covers what happened before the 2nd Age.

Ah! Our fellowship completed it! You can't see it in the background of this video bc the shield is covering them, but I have all the medals hanging in the background.

@@NerdoftheRings THATS AWESOME!

Same here

Indeed! That is actually the copy of The Silmarillion I show in the beginning and reference at the end. My deluxe edition is supposed to arrive tomorrow, so I'm hoping to record both regular and deluxe edition in the same video. :)

@@NerdoftheRings I wrote that comment before watching the video and now I feel dumb now that I'm finally watching the video. Lol

Pretty much, yes. The only other point to know is that it takes the final/most complete version of stories that have multiple versions.

@@NerdoftheRings Ok appreciate you clarifying. So essentially there's no "new" material so to speak. I also heard they left out the writings on Celeborn and Galadriel but I guess given how incomplete they were I can see why.