Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #559759 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 280 pages

Customer Reviews

Tolkien - The illustrated encycopedia by David Day
David Day has created an excellent and entertaining resource for fans of Middle Earth with this well-produced encyclopedia. It is not, as the title misleadingly declares, a TOLKIEN encycopedia, as such - after all, it only covers Tolkien's Middle Earth creation and does not touch upon his other (less well known)works aside from a brief bibliography at the beginning - but this slight nitpick aside, I wholehearedly recommend this book as a quality 'Middle Earth encyclopedia'. It has rich detail, is very user-friendly and although the illustations were not all to my liking (I found some to be a little sketchy or child-like. I would have preferred Alan Lee illustrations) the overall immpression is very favourable. This will sit nicely on your bookshelf among your Tolkien collection and will be invaluable when reading 'The Silmarillion', 'Unfinished Tales' or 'The History of Middle Earth' series as a reference. In short, you can buy this book with confidence if you are looking for a quality encyclopedia of Tolkien's 'Middle earth' - The Valar, Balrogs, Gandalf, Hobbits, Morgoth - all here at your fingertips in one handy, well produced volume.

Excellent for bluffers
Tolkien: The Illustrated Encylopaedia, to give it it's proper name, is a fairly watertight guide to the mythos. The text cannot be faulted for accuracy (most of the time it quotes directly from Tolkien, in other places it paraphrases him) and covers everything, but beware of the frequent typos. The art seems to have been thrown in at the eleventh hour and the quality varies wildly, most of the paintings being lazy and amateurish, but fortunately there's a great slew of sinister, stuning inkwork by the fantastic Ian Miller, the world's least-renowned and most underrated fantasy artist.

Not essential, by any means, but nice to have regardless.

Style over content
This is an attractive volume and there's a lot of information packed into it, but sadly there's also some very sloppy writing and laughable errors, such as that which marries Elrond off to Celeborn! The illustrations are also pretty dire in places, but it's still probably worth space on the Tolkien shelf.