Unfinished Tales was published posthumously in 1980 from stories selected and edited by Christopher Tolkien.
The volume gathers narratives connected with Middle-earth that J.R.R. Tolkien left incomplete, unpublished, or in substantially different versions. Christopher Tolkien organized the material and supplied extensive editorial notes explaining variant texts, names, and chronology.
The book includes stories from several periods of Tolkien’s imagined history, including material about Númenor, the First Age, and the Third Age. It also contains “The Quest of Erebor,” a retrospective account related to The Hobbit, and accounts involving figures such as Galadriel, Celeborn, and the wizard Gandalf.
Unfinished Tales is distinct from The Silmarillion, which was published in 1977 as an edited presentation of Tolkien’s mythology. It is also different from The Children of Húrin, a more unified standalone reconstruction published in 2007. The word “unfinished” refers to the state of the source writings, not to a single unfinished novel.