Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion

In "Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion", Douglas C. Kane reveals a tapestry woven by Christopher Tolkien from different portions of his father's work that is often quite mind-boggling, with inserts that seemed initially to have been editorial inventions shown to have come from some remote portion of Tolkien's vast body of work. He demonstrates how material that was written over the course of more than thirty years was merged together to create a single, coherent text. He also makes a frank appraisal of the material omitted by Christopher Tolkien (and in a couple of egregious cases the material invented by him) and how these omissions and insertions may have distorted his father's vision of what he considered - even more then "The Lord of the Rings" - to be his most important work. It is a fascinating portrait of a unique collaboration that reached beyond the grave.