" A Description of the Island of Númenor ": a reconstruction In 1980, only three years after having presented The Silmarillion to readers, C
In 2021 The Nature of Middle-earth was published,[3] a book edited by Carl Hostetter and presenting, in a similar manner to that of Unfinished Tales, disparate texts on varying subjects. Among them are two texts, respectively entitled 'Lives of the Númenóreans'[4] (Part III, chapter XI) and 'Of the Land and Beasts of Númenor'[5] (Part III, chapter XIII), from which Christopher Tolkien built the text published in Unfinished Tales. In reality, LN and LBN form a single document, existing in three different versions, but always continuous, LBN following on from LN in footnote 5.[6]
This short essay aims to “reconstruct” the text 'A Description of the Island of Númenor' by visualizing which elements Christopher Tolkien extracted from one or another of the source texts to recreate it, but also, to complete the LBN text which was not presented in full by Carl Hostetter in Nature.
