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A review by quoththegirl
Flora of Middle-Earth: Plants of J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium by Walter S. Judd, Graham A. Judd
2.0
This book seemed so promising! I was grievously disappointed. :( It *should* be a beautiful and valuable resource; the product of a partnership between father and son, one a botanist and one an artist, the book gives an account of every plant mentioned in Tolkien's world. And parts of it are beautiful; the illustrations are obviously lovingly done by someone with great talent.
The rest of it is a bit of a mess, though. From a Tolkien-lover's perspective, the book is only moderately useful because it's riddled with errors. "Athelas" is always misspelled as "Athelias." The entry for the ash tree mistakenly says that the word for ash tree in Sindarin is lith. Lith does mean ash--but it means ash as in fire remains, not the tree. In English the words just happen to be homographs, but that is definitely not the case with Sindarin. The entry for ivy mentions that Frodo (not Bilbo) climbed a tree to see black butterflies. Morwen is misspelled Morwin. The first 4-5 chapters could've easily been removed without losing a single thing, especially chapter 3, which had exactly nothing to do with Tolkien and was dry as toast.
From a plant-lover's perspective, the illustrations (while pretty) are essentially useless for identifying specific plants. The black and white, stylized design is vague enough that you'd have no hope of figuring out what some of these plants are in the wild. The descriptions of economic uses for plants was incomplete for several entries. I found numerous typos, which always makes me question the accuracy of the rest of the text. The entry on pipeweed has the hilarious "and thus could thus represent an Old World name" typo in it.
The rest of it is a bit of a mess, though. From a Tolkien-lover's perspective, the book is only moderately useful because it's riddled with errors. "Athelas" is always misspelled as "Athelias." The entry for the ash tree mistakenly says that the word for ash tree in Sindarin is lith. Lith does mean ash--but it means ash as in fire remains, not the tree. In English the words just happen to be homographs, but that is definitely not the case with Sindarin. The entry for ivy mentions that Frodo (not Bilbo) climbed a tree to see black butterflies. Morwen is misspelled Morwin. The first 4-5 chapters could've easily been removed without losing a single thing, especially chapter 3, which had exactly nothing to do with Tolkien and was dry as toast.
From a plant-lover's perspective, the illustrations (while pretty) are essentially useless for identifying specific plants. The black and white, stylized design is vague enough that you'd have no hope of figuring out what some of these plants are in the wild. The descriptions of economic uses for plants was incomplete for several entries. I found numerous typos, which always makes me question the accuracy of the rest of the text. The entry on pipeweed has the hilarious "and thus could thus represent an Old World name" typo in it.