Finished at last! While I'm Tolkien/Middle Earth enthusiast, and this book is generally pretty insightful about the creation and mythology of the Elder Days, I found it a bit of a slog, honestly.

However, this book is (almost) redeeemed by the bits on the Fall of Gondolin (which is pretty compelling stuff!) and the Nauglarung (Necklace of the Dwarves.)

I'm hoping my enthusiam for the series stays high, overall; I'm diving right into Book 3 ,but if that's a slog, too, a break may be in order after that.

Tolkien was such an amazing person

The second part of Christopher Tolkien's presentation and analysis of his father's earliest work in what would become Middle Earth. The tales differ in significant ways from what would become the Silmarillion, but we can clearly see the earliest formulations of some of the core ideas in Tolkien's writing. Christopher's commentary is even handed and he acknowledges the areas where the original manuscripts have been amended by his father, areas where the manuscripts are self-contradictory or incomplete.