The Complete Guide to Middle-earth: from The Hobbit to The Silmarillion is a reference book for J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional universe of Middle-earth, compiled and edited by Robert Foster. It was first published in 1971 under the title A Guide to Middle-earth. A revised and enlarged edition under the title The Complete Guide to Middle-earth was published in 1978. It received a third edition in 2001.
Author
Robert Foster (b. 1949, Brooklyn) earned a Ph.D. in English and Medieval Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and taught subsequently in the English Department at Rutgers University.[1][2] Foster begun work on this in the late sixties, consulting Tolkien works and letters.[3]
AINUR (Q.: 'holy ones') Angelic spirits, offspring of the thought of Ilúvatar. Most of the Ainur dwell with Ilúvatar, but some, the Valar and Maiar (qq.v.), have come to Eä to fulfill the Ainulindalë. ...
Part of the entry for "Ainur", The Complete Guide to Middle-earth[6]
The Complete Guide to Middle-earth, published in 1978 was a major expansion of A Guide to Middle-earth, at almost twice its length, with coverage of The Silmarillion, which came out in 1977.[7] However, as it does not include information on post-Silmarillion material (i.e. Unfinished Tales and the history of composition series The History of Middle-earth), the 1978 edition contains some assertions supported by later publications, and some that are contradicted. For example, the Star of Elendil jewel (the Elendilmir) is identified with the Star of the Dúnedain given to Samwise Gamgee, something refuted by Christopher Tolkien.[8] On the other hand, Foster proposes that Gandalf and Olórin are one and the same; this is stated directly by Gandalf in The Two Towers.[9]
Early editions of The Complete Guide to Middle-earth have been widely recognised as providing an excellent reference on Middle-earth.[12]Lester del Rey praised the 1971 version for covering "literally everything you wanted to know about Middle Earth and were unable to discover before."[13]Christopher Tolkien commended it in 1980 as an "admirable work of reference".[14] in 2002, Charles W. Nelson, author of A Tolkien Bestiary, wrote that the guide was helpful for Tolkien students and enthusiasts, each new edition being a noticeable improvement over its predecessors in terms of comprehensiveness.[3]
Dissenting, Adam Roberts, writing in The Times in 2022, calls the revised edition disappointing and "woefully outdated" in the face of the wealth of information on Tolkien now available on the Internet.[11]
Translations
A Polish edition, Encyklopedia Śródziemia, was published in 1998, and reprinted in 2002, 2003 and 2012.[15] A German edition, Das Große Mittelerde-Lexikon, revised and translated by Helmut W. Pesch, was published in 2002.[16]
^Foster, Robert; Nasmith, Ted (illus.) (2022). The Complete Guide to Middle-earth: The Definitive Guide to the World of J.R.R. Tolkien (Illustrated ed.). HarperCollins. ISBN978-0-0085-3781-4. [alt. subtitle] From The Silmarillion to The Lord of the Rings
^Tolkien 1980, Footnote 8 in 'Many Roads Lead Eastward (1)', p. 309.
^Tolkien 1954, Book 4, ch. 5 "The Window on the West", where Gandalf states: "Many are my names in many countries, he said. Mithrandir among the Elves, Tharkûn to the Dwarves; Olórin I was in my youth in the West that is forgotten, in the South Incánus, in the North Gandalf; to the East I go not.".
^Tolkien 1980, p. 6 (editor's introduction) "If I have been inadequate in explanation or unintentionally obscure, Mr Robert Foster's Complete Guide to Middle-earth supplies, as I have found through frequent use, an admirable work of reference.".
