Legendarium

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"For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!"

― Aragorn in The Two Towers, "The Riders of Rohan"

J.R.R.Tolkien by Donato Giancola

The legendarium is the entirety of J.R.R. Tolkien's works concerning his imagined world of Arda.

Tolkien himself used the term, and also referred to his "mythology" in the same sense. Expecting publication for The Lord of the Rings, and hoping that "The Silmarillion" would be published together, Tolkien envisioned his work (possibly including The Hobbit) as the "Saga of the Three Jewels and the Rings of Power".

The term of legendarium is not the same as "canon". The legendarium includes all Tolkien's corpus in its entirety, even mutually contradicting versions, both earlier and later stages of its conception.

Published works

Writings of the legendarium

Here follows a list of all published texts by Tolkien relating to Arda. For a discussion of the "canonical" status of the texts, consult the page Canon.

• Books
  • The Hobbit
  • The Lord of the Rings
  • The Adventures of Tom Bombadil
  • The Road Goes Ever On (Bilbo's Last Song)
  • The Silmarillion
  • Unfinished Tales
  • The History of Middle-earth (12 volumes)
  • The Children of Húrin
  • Beren and Lúthien
  • The Fall of Gondolin
  • The Nature of Middle-earth
  • The Fall of Númenor

• Books containing various texts and fragments
  • The History of The Hobbit
  • The Annotated Hobbit
  • The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion
  • The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
  • The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (A Secret Vice)
  • J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator

• Journals (mainly concerning Tolkien's linguistics)
  • Vinyar Tengwar (50 issues as of 2013)
  • Parma Eldalamberon (22 issues as of 2015)

Illustrations of the legendarium

• Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien
• J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator
• The Art of The Hobbit
• The Art of The Lord of the Rings
• Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth

Other sources

More of Tolkien's vision of his legendarium can be found in interviews conducted with him. Hints of lesser value (i.e., hard to verify the authenticity), may also be found in reminiscences. There is also much material on the topic that remains unpublished, including many letters not published in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Scholarly bibliography

• Master of Middle-earth (1972) by Paul H. Kocher
• Tolkien and The Silmarillion (1976) by Clyde S. Kilby
• The Road to Middle-earth (1982) by Tom Shippey
• Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth (2000) edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter
• Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (2003) by John Garth
• Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien's Mythology (2005) by Verlyn Flieger

External links

• Tolkien's legendarium at Wikipedia