--- title: "A Guide to Tolkien" subtitle: Book review author: Seth Kenlon publish_date: 2025-05-18 08:00 date: 2025-05-18 08:00 hero_classes: text-light title-h1h2 overlay-dark-gradient hero-large parallax hero_image: landscape-castle-waterfall-fantasy-1920x1080.jpg show_sidebar: true show_breadcrumbs: true show_pagination: true taxonomy: category: culture tag: [ meta, settings ] --- I was shopping at my favourite local used bookshop recently and stumbled upon **A Guide to Tolkien** by David Day. Originally published by Mitchell Beazley of Octopus Publishing Group in 1979, and then republished by Chancellor Press in 2001, this 260 page book is an endlessly useful reference book for even a casual Tolkien fan. This is my review of the book. The hardest thing about being a Tolkien fan is that there's a lot of lore to learn, and a lot of it isn't published in a traditional form. You can get a lot from reading **The Hobbit** and **The Lord of the Rings**, and even more if you stick around for the appendices. From those sources, you generally get a pretty good handle on exactly the stories being told, but there's a lot of background history mentioned in passing. You can learn a lot of that history from posthumous books like **The Silmarilian** and [Children of Hurin](http://mixedsignals.ml/games/blog/culture_tolkien-5-children-of-hurin) and others. But still, you have to string it all together and re-order it into a timeline. How deep does it all go? Deep enough for a pretty plausible telling of the [War of the Rohirrim](http://mixedsignals.ml/games/blog/culture_tolkien-war-of-the-rohirrim) to have been produced. I've come to accept that being a fan of Tolkien (or Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard) is essentially an implicit agreement that "fandom" means never knowing everything. You're signing up to spend much of your fan-hours piecing together a puzzle no-one will ever solve. You're [roleplaying as a Tolkien scholar](http://mixedsignals.ml/games/blog/blog_roleplay-as-a-tolkien-scholar). I used to struggle with that, I guess because I was used to Star Trek, which had so much additional material (short stories, technical manuals, additional series, and so on) to geek out on. But I've come to accept it, and I've been enjoying the game for what it is. ## Benefiting from other people's research Many (if not most) roleplaying games are a group effort, and I think learning about Tolkien is no different. They say you should never split the party, and David Day is either a Tolkien scholar, or he's roleplaying as one. In his book, he has correlated and collated the histories of people and places and terms. It's incredibly convenient. I know there are wikis out there on the Internet that cover Tolkien's lore in exhausting detail. I value those, too. In some ways, many of them are better than David Day's **A Guide to Tolkien**. They have convenient hyperlinks, many of them have citations, and they're nicely indexed by search engines. Honestly, it's a hard sell these days to choose a book over the resources of fans on the Internet. However, one major reason I appreciate David Day's work is exactly for its limited scope. My problem with data is not having too little of it. On the contrary, I can look up Balin and get his entire family line, his signature weapon, and the length of his beard on the Internet. But sometimes, I actually just want to know which underground keep held his tomb. That's not a back-handed compliment to say that **A Guide to Tolkien** is incomplete. **A Guide to Tolkien** is curated, and finite, and there's a lot of value to that. I don't want to be on my mobile phone as I read a book, or watch a movie, scrolling through a lot of very fascinating but maybe overwhelming information about a name or term I've just come across. Opening a paperback book for a quick explanation is exactly what I'm looking for in those moments. ## Entries I don't know how many entries there are in the book because I chose not to spend my time counting each item in the index. However, it is well indexed, with related material referenced across entries. Supposing about 20 entries for each letter of the letters A to W, I estimate 460 distinct articles. The length of each varies, depending on the topic, and probably how much Tolkien wrote about it, balanced with how easy it is to find out more information yourself. The article about Peregrin Took is half a page, and that makes sense because you can learn a lot about Pippin by reading LOTR. The article about Ents is a page and a half, so it contains a lot of lore from other writings by Tolkien (probably his letters and notes?) The article about Dwalin is about a quarter of a page. I don't exactly know how citations would be done elegantly in a work like this. The sources of the data in the book are listed in the Introduction, so I guess if you really want to fact check your fact checker, you can just go read the source material. That's fair, given the context, but I do admit that I sometimes wish for a hint about where some of the information came from, if only so I can focus further future research. ## The question of an expanding universe The Tolkien legendarium used to be pretty stagnate. I don't think I'm ready for a Disney-level cinematic universe for Tolkien, but I do have to admit that so far I've enjoyed the little forays into an expanded universe that the Tolkien estate has permitted. I may get tired of it eventually, but I was pleasantly surprised by both [Shadow of Mordor](http://mixedsignals.ml/games/blog/blog_shadow-of-mordor) and **War of the Rohirrim**. I don't mind that online references incorporate new lore, like Héra from the animated movie, or the game's characterization of Celebrimbor (I haven't seen the TV show, so I have no feelings about it yet). What makes the EU even easier to handle are books like **A Guide to Tolkien**, which preserve the author's canon. I don't mind a flexible canon, and I'm happy to accept a multiverse, each with its own canon. But I also want to be able to find my way back to my starting 'verse. This isn't a condition unique to Tolkien. The same thing is true in the worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and HP Lovecraft. It's just nice, sometimes, to have the physical reassurance of where it all began. ## Guide to Tolkien There are likely lots of books out there that serve the same purpose as **A Guide to Tolkien**. They're encyclopediæ of uncommon but documented knowledge, compiled in one convenient place. If you're a Tolkien fan, it's worth picking one up. Because **A Guide to Tolkien** is the one I own, it's the one I can confidently recommend.