A review by didyousaybooks
The Treason of Isengard by J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien

4.0

A really good companion if you love Tolkien and want to discover his writing process when he write his masterpiece. If not, I’d advice you to leave this be.

It is really interesting to see many alternative on how the story could have gone. Reading this, you start to understand how much work and thinking Tolkien put into his work.
As a regular Tolkien fan, you know it already but reading here all the alternatives (and yet not all of them are even here) about the story, quotes or the multiple names in several drafts, that Christopher Tolkien presents to us. Many excerpts written in now fading pencil draft, crossed sentences on many supports.

Christopher Tolkien underlines the main differences, with all of his father’s source material at hands, between the drafts and the final version.

You’ll discover that Aragorn had many names, Theoden had a daughter for a little while, an analysis of the evolution of the maps and other tidbits of alternative what-ifs which are really neat to know.

This book is really for people who want to dig even more into Tolkien’s world and love to read more academic oriented works as it’s very complete with many notes.