Tolkien’s World is geared towards younger readers who have just started getting interested in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but haven’t yet ventured into the depths that is The Silmarillion. I say that because any of the information you could get from Tolkien’s World can be gathered from one of those three sources, but Tolkien’s World can be a good way to show a young reader that just because they have followed Frodo’s journey to its end, there is still a lot more information out there.
Each page focuses on some aspect of Middle-Earth. The topic can be anything from one of the world’s races, to specific individuals like Bilbo or Gollum, or places like Mirkwood and Mordor. Some pages talk about the weapons and armor used by the Free People or The Enemy, while others go into some of the universe’s more obscure lore like the origin of Gandalf and the other wizards or the forging of the Rings of Power.
Accompanying these topics is detailed artwork and sketches that illustrate the subject matter in a lot of detail. While some of the images could be said to be taken from the movies, it is more like an accurate depiction of how those images were described in the books, since the movies drew from the same highly-detailed descriptions.
While I said earlier that this book is geared towards younger readers who are just getting into reading LoTR and The Hobbit, I can also see it as a way to get a young reader into picking the books up in the first place, especially with the films The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug on the horizon. If you find your child’s interest piqued at these films or the three earlier Peter Jackson movies, then you might want to use this book to help guide the kid into picking up the J.R.R. Tolkien novels.
