The Ultimate Tolkien Collection

Firehawk52 Presents: The Ultimate Tolkien Collection

After countless hours and very long nights and sometimes early mornings, I have assembled the Ultimate Tolkien Collection.

To make a long story short, I watched the Rings of Power show and found it really bad. But why was it bad? Maybe I was affected by the reviewers who pointed out the obvious discrepancies between the official lore and the TV show. I have of course read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and seen the movies, but there were talks about the Silmarillion and the Unfinished Tales. Apparently they added a lot more lore, but they were difficult to follow because of those publications jumping back and forth in time.

I tried to find some kind of site where this lore was explained - a chronological view of it. And yes, there are websites, and I also found chronology.org which my collection is based on. But it was text and nothing more. There were no chronological audiobook or any eBooks that explained the lore in chronological order.

So I created it.

I started by downloading the eBooks that was relevant for the lore (according to chronology.org). These are the books. In no particular order.

- Adventures of Tom Bombadil

- History of Middle-Earth (All 12 Volumes)

- The Children of Húrin

- The Hobbit

- The Lord of the Rings (50th Anniversary Edition) - all three books in one eBook

- The Silmarillion

- Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-Earth

Then I marked the pdf-files with the markings from chronology.org.

🟦 Name of waypoint

🟥 Instructions to go to waypoint

⬛️ Skip

🟧 THE END

That required many painstaking hours, but I eventually completed it.

The next part was to get the audiobooks. So I downloaded the best versions of those. If Andy Serkis had recorded an audiobook, I have it - because he's the king. Another name worth mentioning is Christopher Lee (Saruman in the Lord of the Rings movies) that recorded Children of Húrin.

Then I basically started from scratch with the "Days before days", "Years of Lamps", and "Years of Trees" and ended up in the time after "The Third Age" (after Return of the King). I took the recorded passages and edited the audio files, so it matched the lore, jumping back and forth between the books and the audiobooks. I had no idea how much time that would take, but I finally reached THE END.

Now, so you can follow along the books I even added custom audio instructions when you need to jump in the books, so you can enjoy the lore while reading along at the same time. You can choose "no instructions" playlist to omit these and just enjoy the audiobooks. Please note that the History of Middle-Earth books pertinent to the lore does not have audiobooks - they simply don't exist - so if you choose "no instructions" you will not be referred to those sections, so it is recommended to keep instructions on ("with instructions" playlist) - the instructions just last for a few seconds between sections. I will of course edit these parts if and when the audiobooks becomes available.

So after about a week (almost non-stop) work and 112 hours, 21 minutes and 32 seconds (4 days, 16 hours, 21 minutes and 32 seconds) of recording, I created the Ultimate Tolkien Collection. I believe this can be enjoyed by fans and newcomers alike.

How to get started?

Start by listening to Welcome and it will tell you some of the same instructions that I did here. Then you simply import the playlist of your choice and play. It will start with 01-S-AA. But wait, what does S-AA mean? AA is just the name of the section, so you know where to jump. And as for the S. Here's the list of the abbreviations and their meanings.

S: The Silmarillion.

U: Unfinished Tales.

C: The Children of Húrin.

H: The Hobbit.

F: Fellowship of the Ring

T: The Two Towers

R: The Return of the King

ATB: The Adventures of Tom Bombadil

LR: History of Middle-Earth vol. 5: The Lost Road (no audiobook)

SD: History of Middle-Earth vol. 9: Sauron Defeated (no audiobook)

MR: History of Middle-Earth vol. 10: Morgoth’s Ring (no audiobook)

WJ: History of Middle-Earth: The War of the Jewels vol. 11 (no audiobook)

PME: History of Middle-Earth: The Peoples of Middle-Earth vol 12. (no audiobook)

So, I hope you enjoy this journey through the Tolkien universe and beyond. I know, I will...