This is a review of a massive epic that was written very shortly after its last installment was published. Yes, the reviewer got some details wrong, but there s

This is a review of a massive epic that was written very shortly after its last installment was published. Yes, the reviewer got some details wrong, but there simply hadn't been time for him (or just about anyone else) to have read it through multiple times and analyzed it in depth like so many of us have today. A great deal of the backstory hadn't been published at all. (I'm pretty sure nobody outside Tolkien's inner circle and maybe a handful of publisher's readers had even seen the term "Maiar" yet when this was written, for example.) So I'd praise this review for its early enthusiasm and for its appreciation of some of Tolkien's core themes and give it something of a pass on the niggling details. [There's a lot more wonderful Tolkien knowledge waiting for you out there, too, if and when you want to delve into it. It starts to lean inevitably toward textual history as you delve deeper, but some of that is inevitable with a work of this scope whose author was so far from completing it when he died.]