David Day (2)Rezensionen

I have to admit that this had a lot more language history than I expected. Every time it started to get interesting, it went down another rabbit hole of explaining a word in depth. Maybe I should have expected this but it wasn’t quite what I was hoping for.

David Day ha escrito un completo bestiario que incluye los nombres de las criaturas y monstruos imaginados por Tolkien, así como una exhaustiva relación de razas, ciudades, reinos, deidades, flora, batallas y los infinitos sucesos que tuvieron lugar en la Tierra Media.

Una obra de investigación literaria sobre los cuentos y leyendas que inspiraron a J.R.R. Tolkien.

David Day muestra que El Señor de los Anillos continúa una larga tradición que nació junto con las civilizaciones y que J.R.R. Tolkien creó una nueva mitología para los lectores del siglo veinte inspirándose en leyendas y mitos de la antigüedad.
Se acompaña con doce ilustraciones en color de Alan Lee, artista y ilustrador de El Señor de los Anillos.

The second book I've gotten from David Day about Tolkien's Middle-Earth (the first being The Atlas of Middle-Earth). Both come with wonderful illustrations and great information. This is a bit more in-depth out of universe than the previous one which was mostly all in-universe.

Reading up on some of the influences, mythologies, and legends that Tolkien used to create the various monsters/realms/ideas behind his writing was fascinating.

This is a fast, quick, engaging read for anyone interested or curious or just loves Tolkien's Middle-Earth and the universe and mythology behind it.

13 copies

A lovely companion to The Hobbit that fleshes out the world a bit more.

"In The Lord of the Ring, in Prince Aragorn 's kiss which awakens the sleeping Princess Éowyn, we are meant to see the 'origin' of the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty"
LOL

The images by Alan Lee are great

The text is worthless

more a summary than an atlas, but handy to have an outline of Middle Earth in one book.

Los castillos más famosos de las leyendas, los mitos, y la fantasía a través de las sugerentes ilustraciones de Alan Lee.

The artwork in this book is gorgeous. And I'm loving the pieces of etymological background these books on Tolkien have shared.

Man, that's a lot of subtext.

Beautiful art, but not much else here. And unfortunately, much of it looks just like the movies depict the character/event. It's difficult to capture Silmarillion, Hobbit, AND Lord of the Rings in a short, small paperback book. Day, to his credit, does tell us in the introduction that this book may help convince a movie-seer to read the books, or read another Tolkien book. The descriptions of the events and characters barely scratch the surface. Further, some reviewers have called into question the accuracy of some of the information in the book. Regrettably, this is not for serious Tolkien fans.

Much like [b:An Atlas of Tolkien|35446966|An Atlas of Tolkien|David Day|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1497636849s/35446966.jpg|56831550], this book has beautiful artwork. Sadly, that's about the only positive thing here. Trying to capture the complexity of a Tolkien battle on two 7x5" pages is - as Boromir would say - utter folly. We do learn an awful lot about the Norse, Egyptian, German, and Anglo-Saxon myths much of Tolkien's creations are based on. Those are interesting, but I'm not sure this is the place for them. I feel like I learned more about First Age and Second Age battles in [b:An Atlas of Tolkien|35446966|An Atlas of Tolkien|David Day|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1497636849s/35446966.jpg|56831550] than this book. This book could have been so much better if Day had focused on fewer battles, done simpler line drawings focusing on only a portion of the battlefield at a time, and used bigger pages.

This maybe isn’t the best book to read cover to cover, since it’s laid out like a traditional encyclopedia, but man is it a great source of information about every aspect of Middle Earth! Obviously it doesn’t go into as much detail about the topics as the novels, but it gives solid outlines (longer than I expected in some cases) so that readers can easily cross reference events, places, groups of characters, etc while reading the novels. My only real complaint is that the author chose not to simplify Tolkien’s multi-naming conventions, so there are often multiple entries for a single group rather than just saying “see ____” and listing a main entry.

David Day’s An Atlas of Tolkien builds upon the work he began in his Tolkien Bestiary to work as a guidebook to J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium. Though Day describes events from The Silmarillion through The Hobbit and finally Lord of the Rings, he does so only as necessary to explain matters of time and space in describing locations. Like his previous work, Day commissioned artists to create paintings illustrating Tolkien’s world. The volume works well as a companion and guide to Tolkien’s work, particularly as a reference for those looking to keep track of events during The Silmarillion or to refresh their memories about those events in Lord of the Rings which reference The Silmarillion. The contributing artists – Ivan Allen, John Blanche, Sally Davies, Michael Foreman, Linda Garland, Melvin Grant, David Kearney, Ian Miller, Andrew Mockett, Lidia Postma, and others – imbue the work with visual references as epic as the texts that inspired them while giving distinctive styles to each of the places and events in question. Day’s Atlas of Tolkien succeeds as a guidebook for fans while the binding of this edition gives it the appearance of a work that could exist in-universe.½

The second book I've gotten from David Day about Tolkien's Middle-Earth (the first being The Atlas of Middle-Earth). Both come with wonderful illustrations and great information. This is a bit more in-depth out of universe than the previous one which was mostly all in-universe.

Reading up on some of the influences, mythologies, and legends that Tolkien used to create the various monsters/realms/ideas behind his writing was fascinating.

This is a fast, quick, engaging read for anyone interested or curious or just loves Tolkien's Middle-Earth and the universe and mythology behind it.

This is a very pretty book with sketches, colour illustrations, time-lines and comparative tables. However, the content is dissappointing. This book comes across as a collection of superficial notes or dictionary entries of people and events, rather than a coherent analysis of Tolkien's heroes. This is basically a collection of occassionally interesting but speculative and flimsy comparisons between Tolkien's mythology, people, kingdoms, and events and those of real-world mythologies, legends, kingdoms/empires and historical events. The book provides nothing new for Tolkien fans and is rather repetitive, with numerous factual errors and confusion of names. Day also seems to refute some of Tolkien's own professed origins as provided by Christopher Tolkien in his numerous texts. There are no references so you can't research where Day came up with Tolkien's opinions or statements.

Recommended Book:
Aragorn - J. R. R. Tolkien's Undervalued Hero by Angela P. Nicholas

Disappointing.

This book LOOKS pretty but the contents are superficial, with many factual errors, poor quality maps and half-complete summaries. The author is rather liberal in his interpretation of Tolkien's sources of inspirations and what Tolkien intended when he developed his Middle-Earth. This book is supposed to be about the battles of Tolkien, the who, what, where and battle tactics as stated in the introduction. However, very little of this is evident. There are pretty pictures and timelines, as well as explanations of the historical and mythical background to Tolkien's works, but little about the actual battles. Even the wikipedia page provides more information that the book, but it does not look as pretty.

If you want information about battles and maps, try Atlas of Tolkien's Middle-Earth by Karen Wunn Fonstad and Journeys of Frodo: An Atlas of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings by Barbara Strachey.

Also interesting is Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit by Corey Olsen and
Making of Middle-Earth by Christopher A Snyder.

A beautifully illustrated book that takes a look at the Dark Powers in Tolkien's Middle-Earth books. David Day also makes several comparisons between Tolkien's "bad guys" and various mythologies throughout the work, some of which are rather superficial. If you are a Tolkien fan, you won't find anything new in this book, but the illustrations and timelines are nice.

This isn't the type of ATLAS that has maps in it. This is the type of atlas that has tables, illustrations, some maps, charts and a bit of superficial half-summaries of places and events under headings. This book is pretty but there is nothing of substance in the contents. If you haven't read the Silmarillion, or the Appendices to the Lord of the Rings you will be lost and confused. If you have read those works, then this book will provide nothing new. It isn't particularly useful as a guide either. David Day also tends to be liberal with his interpretation of some aspects Tolkien's works.

If you want maps, try Atlas of Tolkien's Middle-Earth by Karen Wunn Fonstad and Journeys of Frodo: An Atlas of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings by barbara Strachey.

Also interesting is Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit by Corey Olsen and
Making of Middle-Earth by Christopher A Snyder.

Nevermore is much better in concept than in execution, sadly: 24 species whose extinction was caused by humans, described in contemporary observations prior to extinction, modern scientific knowledge of the species where it exists, a beautiful illustration of what the animal looked like, and a poem about it by the author.

The illustrations were lovely and the contemporary observations were fascinating, but the poems just didn't do it for me. I think it must be hard to create 24 compelling literary works of art on essentially the same theme for a single volume; most of them ended up feeling forced to me.

However, I think the book accomplishes the author's primary aim of creating sympathy and grief for all of these vanished creatures, and reducing sympathy for the human slaughterers. It is very difficult to retain one's admiration for humanity when, over and over, the contemporary accounts of the species and their extinction are, "We found a new country with uncountable numbers of these animals, so innocent and unwary of us that they didn't know to run away, so of course we killed them all for fun."

This is an extremely terrible book. The author has trawled the folklore of the world for stories involving magic rings. The relevance of all this material to The Lord of the Rings is impossible to check, as no sources are provided. Day gets many things wrong about Tolkien, so I would not place any reliance on anything he says about anything else. This opinion is widely shared among serious Tolkienists -- whom Day, I understand, has called "the Tolkien Taliban." The illustrations by Alan Lee -- who I hope was well paid for his participation -- are very nice, as one would expect. Four stars for Lee, zero stars for Day.

This volume is indispensable for the reader of Tolkien who, like me, struggle with the language of the works published posthumously in Middle-Earth. The size is handy and the construction is quality. My only regret is that the atlas must be purchased separately in an altogether different volume. (I would have gladly paid both prices to have one book containing all the information and maps, etc.)

David Day's Atlas of Tolkein is really an impressive collection of art work in a compacted retelling of the creation & development of Tolkein's imaginary world. The author points out that the book is more about the retelling of the shaping & reshaping of Tolkein's Middle Earth through the eyes of the artist. As the reader surveys the work, it is exactly that. If you are expecting the retelling of the Tolkein stories, you will need to read the stories elsewhere. Here is a good addition to the Tolkein literature which will enhance, from an artistic view, the reader's interest in the Tolkein genre.

Finished this at work today for my first book of 2017 (challenge this year is 90 books, instead of last year's 85, which means about a book every 4 days).

The illustrations in this are wonderful. The atlas-maps though aren't quite so good, but there is plenty of interesting content. It's presented chronologically, but by the War of the Ring, there is a lot less emphasis on the maps/world and much more emphasis on everything middle-earth by that point. Wish there were more maps of the War of the Ring era rather than just info-blurbs and drawings (of characters/battles). Still a wonderful companion piece to LOTR/Simarillion/Hobbit/etc.