J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1980 posthumous collection of Middle-earth stories is titled Unfinished Tales.
Christopher Tolkien edited and published the book after his father’s death. It gathers narratives and fragments from different periods of Tolkien’s writing, including material connected with Númenor, the First Age, and the Third Age. Unlike a conventional novel, the collection preserves incomplete versions, alternative accounts, and editorial notes explaining how the texts relate to one another.
Unfinished Tales is especially valuable because it expands stories that receive only brief treatment in The Lord of the Rings. Examples include the history of Galadriel and Celeborn, the disaster of the Gladden Fields, and the founding of Rohan. The volume also contains the detailed account of the journey of the Istari and the early history of the Númenórean kingdoms.
Readers sometimes confuse it with The Silmarillion, which Christopher Tolkien assembled into a more continuous narrative. Unfinished Tales deliberately shows more of Tolkien’s unfinished and variant material.