This could be a very nice little book, and useful too. But truth be told it is not much either. I suppose all the Alan Lee illustrations are derived from elsewhere, most if not all from his illustrated edition of The Lord of the Rings itself, and reproduced here in very small size. The poems themselves of course are what they are, but in my opinion many of them suffer a little from the decision not to include any context or background around them.

The book does not include any table of contents or index, in fact not even page numbers at all. Ironic as it is, it is probably easier and quicker to find the poem you are looking for from the big book itself – which, incidentally, does include a special index for poems, with both titles and first words indexed.

If there were no such blatant and elementary problems as described above, I might add that a scholarly foreword dealing with the history and significance of poems in Tolkien's fiction would be nice...

We Tolkien fans are so easy to cash in! ( )