The Silmarillion

By J. R. R. Tolkien

First edition, first impression, the domestic issue printed by Billing & Sons: London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977.

Original navy cloth, the spine lettered in gilt beneath Tolkien's heraldic device for Lúthien Tinúviel, top edge stained blue, without headbands. Two maps, printed in red and black: The Realms of the Noldor and the Sindar facing page 120, and the folding Map of Beleriand and the Lands to the North at the rear. Dust jacket incorporating Tolkien's own heraldic emblems, unclipped and priced £4.95 net, in U.K. only.

A very good copy: the binding square and firm with both maps present and intact. Some very faint staining to the bottom portion of the fore-edge of the text-block, dog-earing to the top corners of the opening few leaves, and very slight offsetting to the endpapers.

The original and unclipped dust jacket very good: some mild fading to the spine panel and light wear to the top edge, chiefly at the spine head, with some transfer of colour to the verso at the bottom corners of the upper and lower panels.

Tolkien began the earliest of these tales, the fall of Gondolin, during the First World War; in Christopher Tolkien's words, "at the time of my father's death fifty-six years later it was still unfinished". What survived was a large and disordered body of manuscript in competing versions, and the son's task, as he described it, was "a work of organisation, not of completion": he worked out a single text by selection and arrangement, assisted through 1974 and 1975 by Guy Gavriel Kay. The book followed in 1977, four years after his father's death, and was the first publication at book length of the legends of the First Age to which The Lord of the Rings looks back. The six heraldic devices on the jacket are Tolkien's own designs: Lúthien Tinúviel on the upper panel, and Fingolfin, Eärendil, Idril Celebrindal, Elwë and Fëanor on the lower.