Unfinished Tales is the 1980 J.R.R. Tolkien book of unfinished Middle-earth narratives edited by Christopher Tolkien.
Christopher Tolkien assembled and edited the material after his father’s death. The book contains narratives and background texts from different periods of Tolkien’s writing, including stories connected with Númenor, the First Age, and the Third Age. It is not a single continuous novel.
Several sections expand events or characters familiar from The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. Examples include the tale of the children of Húrin in an earlier form, the history of Galadriel and Celeborn, and accounts connected with the Istari and the fall of Númenor.
Because Tolkien revised his mythology repeatedly, Christopher often had to explain variant versions and editorial choices. Unfinished Tales is therefore valuable both as storytelling and as evidence of Tolkien’s working process. Readers should not treat every passage as equally polished or fully integrated into one final canon.