London, Allen & Unwin/Unwin Hyman/Harper Collins, 1977-1996. A complete set of the first editions of these poems, tales and songs that underlay Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit. Tolkien began writing these tales while in college, 40 years before LOTR was published. Tolkien was a student of philology, the study of historical linguistics and the rules by which languages evolve, and in these stories he invented archaic languages and the stories told in those languages, and then tracked the evolution of both the stories and the language until they became the legends and mythology that informed Middle Earth. This attention to the actual process of the historical evolution of languages, and the way that the tales' history is embodied in linguistic evolution itself, is part of what gives the Trilogy its powerful sense of reality and immediacy: the characters are embedded in a historical context that is most often implicit, not explicit, just as our own historical context is. But long before the Lord of the Rings was on Tolkien's horizon, he wrote these tales with an eye toward the way myth and legend live and change over time; the stories are compelling in and of themselves, beyond the degree to which they inform his unquestioned masterpiece. They are also the reason that his masterpiece has withstood the test of time so far, and will likely continue to do so: the stories take place on a canvas whose scale is the broad sweep of human and linguistic history, and they are not bound to a particular time and place. In particular, these stories, most of them written between 1913 and the early 1940s, give the lie to the simplistic notion that Tolkien's trilogy is a mere analogue for the conflicts involved in World War II. If anything, it was the First World War -- with its senseless, mechanized destruction on a heretofore unimaginable scale -- that influenced Tolkien in his view that battle between the forces of good and evil was not a struggle of ideologies so much as one between a world view in harmony with nature and one that focused on unchecked industrial development. Volume 3 has a very slight lamination wrinkle, virtually unnoticeable, and Unfinished Tales has slight fading to top stain and jacket lettering; otherwise a fine set in fine, unclipped dust jackets. The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and Volumes 1, 2 and 4 have no printed prices, as issued: Volume 1 has had a price sticker removed; Volume 4 has an A&U price sticker. Unfinished Tales is a review copy and the first issue, with the misprinted page 234. Volumes 10 and 11 have no prices on the flaps, i.e., the export edition dust jackets (which, by the usual standards of the publication process, probably preceded those with printed prices). Published over the course of more than a dozen years, complete sets are very difficult to assemble as all of the volumes had small first printings, and some were positively tiny -- 1500 copies or so. [#023326] SOLD