Tolkien THE SILMARILLION First Illustrated Edition Nasmith
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Tolkien THE SILMARILLION First Illustrated Edition Nasmith
First illustrated Edition, first print hardback of THE SILMARILLION - The Myths and Legends of Middle Earth, by J. R. R. Tolkien and published by HarperCollinsPublishers, London in 1998. Illustrated by the celebrated artist Ted Nasmith. Edited by Christopher Tolkien, the author`s son. With complete number line 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2. Map of Middle Earth on the endpapers.
The book is in very good condition (clean black cloth boards with silver lettering) with minor wear to the illustrated dust jacket, which is not price clipped (light creasing to the edges, slightly more around the spine). Internally, the pages are clean and tight and there are no tears and no inscriptions. There is slight yellowing towards the page ends.
After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda, and Middle-earth within it. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings.
While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature —or, more precisely, of high fantasy.
Tolkien wrote a brief "Sketch of the Mythology" which included the tales of Beren and Lúthien and of Túrin, and that sketch eventually evolved into the Quenta Silmarillion, an epic history that Tolkien started three times but never published. Tolkien desperately hoped to publish it along with The Lord of the Rings, but publishers (both Allen & Unwin and Collins) got cold feet. Moreover, printing costs were very high in 1950s Britain, requiring The Lord of the Rings to be published in three volumes. The story of this continuous redrafting is told in the posthumous series The History of Middle-earth, edited by Tolkien's son, Christopher Tolkien. From around 1936, Tolkien began to extend this framework to include the tale of The Fall of Númenor, which was inspired by the legend of Atlantis. Published in 1977, the final work, entitled The Silmarillion, received the Locus Award for Best Fantasy novel in 1978.
"The tales of The Silmarillion were the underlying inspiration and source of J.R.R. Tolkien's imaginative writing; he worked on the book throughout his life, but never brought to a final form. Long preceding in its origins The Lord of the Rings, it is the story of the First Age of Tolkien's world, the ancient drama to which characters in The Lord of the Rings look back, and in which some of them, such as Elrond and Galadriel, took part.
The title Silmarillion is shortened from Quenta Silmarillion, "The History of the Silmarils," the three great jewels created by Feanor, most gifted of the Elves, in which he imprisoned the light of the Two Trees that illumined Valinor, the land of the gods. When Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, destroyed the Trees, that light lived on only in the Silmarils; and Morgoth seized them and set them in his crown, guarded in the impenetrable fortress of Angband in the north of Middle-earth. The Silmarillion is the history of the rebellion of Feanor and his people against the gods, their exile in Middle-earth, and their war, hopeless despite all the heroism of Elves and Men, against the great Enemy.
The book includes several other shorter works beside The Silmarillion proper. Preceding it are Ainulindale, the myth of Creation, and Valaquenta, in which the nature and powers of each of the gods are described. After The Silmarillion is Akallabeth, the story of the downfall of the great island kingdom of Numenor at the end of the Second Age; and completing the volume is the tale Of the Rings of Power.
This new edition of The Silmarillion contains 20 full colour illustrations specially commissioned from artist Ted Nasmith."
365 pages.
ISBN: 0 261 10366 0
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Tolkien THE SILMARILLION First Illustrated Edition Nasmith