A review by unrealpunk
The Book of Lost Tales, Volume 1: Part One by J.R.R. Tolkien

4.0

This really makes you wish the Eriol/Aelfwine frame could have been part of the published Silmarillion.  But there's an extra charm to it's effect in the Book of Lost Tales in the way Christopher's painstaking excavation of these texts is like a meta counterpoint to Eriol's pursuit of the tales and full appreciation of Tinfang Warble's music.  There's a multidimensionality to the presentation of the texts as a heterogenous assemblage of partially formed narratives, palimpsests, and disorganized leaves that befits the profusion of Tolkien's imaginative project into something like a lost cultural mythology that must be carefully studied and cross-indexed to be properly reconstructed.