The War of the Jewels
11th volume of the 12-volume series 'The History of Middle-earth'
The War of the Jewels (1994) is the 11th volume of Christopher Tolkien's series The History of Middle-earth, analysing the unpublished manuscripts of his father J. R. R. Tolkien. It is the second of two volumes—Morgoth's Ring being the first—to explore the later 1951 Silmarillion drafts (those written after the completion of The Lord of the Rings).
Book
Contents
The volume includes:
The second part of the 1951 Silmarillion drafts
An expanded account of the "Grey Annals", the history of Beleriand after the coming of the Elves.
Additional narratives involving Húrin and the tragedy of his children (see Narn i Chîn Húrin). "The Wanderings of Húrin" is the conclusion to the Narn. It was not included in the final Silmarillion because Christopher Tolkien feared that the heavy compression which would have been necessary to make it a stylistic match with the rest of the book would have been too difficult and would have made the story overly complex and difficult to read.
Christopher Tolkien's explanation of how he, with the collaboration of future fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay, constructed Chapter 22 "Of the Ruin of Doriath" of the Quenta Silmarillion, since none of his father's accounts of this episode were recent enough to fit the narrative in its final form. In particular, the old texts all portray Thingol as a miser who cheats the Dwarves out of their payment, and the portrayal of the Girdle of Melian in the older stories is much weaker than the impenetrable barrier of the post-Lord of the Rings writings.
Tolkien's exploration of the origins of the Ents and the great Eagles.
"Quendi and Eldar" discusses the many names the Elves gave to themselves in Primitive Quendian and Common Eldarin and their evolution in Quenya, Telerin, and Sindarin; it has many details about the history of the Elves and their sundering.
“The War of the Jewels” enters the record as 11th volume of the 12-volume series 'The History of Middle-earth'. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jewels, 11th and volume can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q503921. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1994 and 1951.
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This entry incorporates text from “The War of the Jewels” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.