The Fall of Númenor

I believe this is one of the first books released in the same style as the Christopher Tolkien ones post his death. Which of course, still features massive contributions from his life’s work.

In the same vein as Christopher’s work, this sets out to give a straight-forward linear storyline for the falling of Númenor. It also does a really good job taking the reader through the early history of Sauron. It does not seek to overwrite, or undo previous works. As with the other works taken from The Silmarillion and Appendices, it does read similarly to a textbook in places, but doing audio from Brian Sibley and Samuel West made it very digestible. Personally for me, hearing pieces from each that are featured elsewhere just really helps my understanding, as it can be really dense.

This has a beautiful wrapped artwork for the dust jacket (Alan Lee of course), a ribbon bookmark, beautiful interior artwork as well as some nice smaller chapter headers and footers. It has a great quality naked hardcover wrap too, a fantastic edition for a Tolkien collector.

One thing I’d love to highlight is how perfectly this cover matches the depiction shown in The Rings of Power show…I mean spot on. Obviously it comes from the text itself anyway, but when so much else gets changed…it’s just cool. The storyline really goes to show just how much they could do with the show itself. There’s so much going on in the appendices and this edition is the proof.