The History of Middle-earth
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The History of Middle-earth is a 12-volume series of books that collect and analyse material relating to the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, produced by his son Christopher Tolkien. They are extremely detailed, to the point of documenting scraps of paper that have been erased multiple times with hundreds of footnotes. In analysing this material in such detail, Christopher Tolkien seems to have been as obsessed with documenting the history of the writing of the Middle-earth stories as his father was with documenting the fictional history of Middle-earth itself. In these cases, it would seem that obsession is not necessarily a bad thing.

1. The Book of Lost Tales 1 (1983)
2. The Book of Lost Tales 2 (1984)
3. The Lays of Beleriand (1985)
4. The Shaping of Middle-Earth (1986)
5. The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987)
6. The Return of the Shadow (The History of The Lord of the Rings v.1) (1988)
7. The Treason of Isengard (The History of The Lord of the Rings v.2) (1989)
8. The War of the Ring (The History of The Lord of the Rings v.3) (1990)
9. Sauron Defeated (The History of The Lord of the Rings v.4) (1992)
10. Morgoth's Ring (The Later Silmarillion v.1) (1993)
11. The War of the Jewels (The Later Silmarillion v.2) (1994)
12. The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996)

The original article can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Middle-earth.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.