How long does it take to read The Lost Road and Other Writings?
J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien
The Lost Road and Other Writings by J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien takes about 8 hours 21 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
Book 5 of The History of Middle-earth
Previous: The Shaping of Middle-earth Next: The Return of the Shadow
About 8 hours 21 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1987. 455 pages, about 125,125 words.
17 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 13 hours 54 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 21 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 13 minutes |
The page count is the median across 10 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
At the end of the 1937 J.R.R. Tolkien reluctantly set aside his now greatly elaborated work on the myths and heroic legends of Valinor and Middle-earth and began The Lord of the Rings. This fifth volume of The History of Middle-earth, edited by Christopher Tolkien, completes the presentation of the whole compass of his writing on those themes up to that time. Later forms of the Annuals of Valinor and the Annals of Berleriand had been composed, The Silmarillion was nearing completion in a greatly amplified version, and a new map had been made; the myth of the Music of the Ainur had become a separate work; and the legend of the Downfall of Numenor had already entered in a primitive form, introducing the cardinal ideas of the World Made Round and the Straight Path into the vanished West. Closely associated with this was the abandoned time-travel story, The Lost Road, which was to link the world of Numenor and Middle-earth with the legends of many other times and peoples. A long essay, The Lhammas, had been written on the ever more complex relations of the languages and dialects of Middle-earth; and an etymological dictionary had been undertaken, in which a great number of words and names in the Elvish languages were registered and their formation explained - thus providing by far the most extensive account of their vocabularies that has appeared.
Subjects: Literary collections, Middle Earth (Imaginary place), English Fantasy fiction, Textual Criticism, Science fiction, Middle earth (imaginary place), fiction
