Unfinished Tales by J.R.R. Tolkien
Published 1980 · 452 pages · 124,300 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Fantasy, Short Fiction
How hard is Unfinished Tales to read?
Unfinished Tales scores 53 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 66 out of 100
- Tolkien's archaic diction, invented Elvish names and philological notes make the prose dense, though not as extreme as Joyce. It sits above The Great Gatsby and approaches the formal register of Moby-Dick's elevated passages.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- The tales use stately, elevated sentences, while Christopher Tolkien's commentary adds scholarly qualifications and variant readings. It is more demanding than 1984 but far from Faulkner.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Events stay concrete: journeys, battles, marriages and curses. Editorial discussion of textual development adds some abstraction beyond the plain narrative of The Road.
- Information density: 74 out of 100
- Genealogies, chronologies, variant names and appendices across four ages pack in facts at a pace near 2666, with appendices on calendars and measures.
- Narrative indirection: 42 out of 100
- Stories are told directly, but fragments and gaps leave readers to infer what the missing parts would have said. It asks for more assembly than Beach Read, far less than Pedro Páramo.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- Curses, hidden cities, the sea and the Palantíri carry mythic weight, though the tales mostly stay literal. It is less symbol-laden than The Great Gatsby.
- Ironic distance: 20 out of 100
- The tales are earnest and tragic, in the register of epic. Only the editor's dry scholarly asides add distance.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- Many pieces break off or exist in competing versions, leaving endings unwritten. Tolkien's fragments resist closure more than The Brothers Karamazov, by accident of incompleteness rather than design.
- Structural complexity: 66 out of 100
- The book arranges tales by age, mixes finished narratives with drafts, notes and essays, and cross-references versions. It is more complex than War and Peace's chronology but far simpler than Ulysses.
How Unfinished Tales is regarded
Unfinished Tales holds a literary regard score of 60 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.