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* The Book of Lost
Tales was the first major work of imagination by J.R.R. Tolkien, begun
in 1916-17 when he was twenty-five years old and left incomplete several years later.
It stands at the beginning
of the entire conception of Middle-Earth and Valinor, myths and legends that came to be
called The Silmarillion. Embedded in English legend and
English association, they are
set in the narrative frame of a great westward voyage over the Ocean by a mariner named Eriel
to Tol Eressea, the Lonely Isle, where Elves dwelt; from them he learned their true
history, the Lost Tales of Elfineese. In the Tales are found
the earliest accounts and original
ideas of Gods and Elves, Dwarves, Balrogs, and Orcs; of the Silmarils and the Two Trees of
Valinor; of Nargothrond and Gondolin; of the geography and cosmography of the
invented world.
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