s with The Silmarillion, Christopher Tolkien edited and published Unfinished Tales before he had finished his study of the materials in his father's archive. Despite shortcomings in editorial consistency, Unfinished Tales provides detailed information about characters, events and places mentioned only briefly in The Lord of the Rings. Tales include alternate accounts of the origins of Gandalf and the Wizards, the death of Isildur and the loss of the One Ring in the Gladden Fields, and the founding of the kingdom of Rohan.
Of particular note is the tale of Tar-Aldarion and Erendis, the only known story set within Númenor before its fall. A map of Númenor is included.
Unfinished Tales had commercial success, demonstrating that demand for Tolkien's stories several years after his death grew on. Considering this, Christopher Tolkien began to embark upon the more ambitious twelve-volume work entitled The History of Middle-earth which encompasses nearly the entire corpus of Tolkien's Middle-earth writings.
