約翰·羅納德·魯埃爾·托爾金（1892—1973）　牛津大學教授，古英語專傢。童年傢境窘迫，12歲時成瞭孤兒。1911年到牛津大學的埃剋塞學院學習古英語、日耳曼語係、威爾士語與哥特語，顯示齣令人矚目的語言學天纔。一次大戰中赴法參戰，後因病迴國。曾在裏茲大學、牛津大學任教，1959年退休。托爾金的著作不多，1937年齣版《霍比特人》，立即獲得成功；其後又耗時16年成就瞭魔幻小說巨著《魔戒》，獲得極大的成功，崇拜者趨之若鶩，影響大大超齣瞭作者和齣版者的預想。1973年9月托爾金去世，與妻子閤葬在牛津北郊的一個公墓裏。

This de luxe collector's edition features the first edition text and eight full-colour plates, with an exclusive colour frontispiece illustration. The book is quarterbound with a special gold motif stamped on the front board and is presented in a matching slipcase. There are tales of Middle-earth from times long before The Lord of the Rings, and the story told in this book is set in the great country that lay beyond the Grey Havens in the West: lands where Treebeard once walked, but which were drowned in the great cataclysm that ended the First Age of the World. In that remote time Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, dwelt in the vast fortress of Angband, the Hells of Iron, in the North; and the tragedy of Turin and his sister Nienor unfolded within the shadow of the fear of Angband and the war waged by Morgoth against the lands and secret cities of the Elves. Their brief and passionate lives were dominated by the elemental hatred that Morgoth bore them as the children of Hurin, the man who had dared to defy and to scorn him to his face. Against them he sent his most formidable servant, Glaurung, a powerful spirit in the form of a huge wingless dragon of fire. Into this story of brutal conquest and flight, of forest hiding-places and pursuit, of resistance with lessening hope, the Dark Lord and the Dragon enter in direly articulate form. Sardonic and mocking, Glaurung manipulated the fates of Turin and Nienor by lies of diabolic cunning and guile, and the curse of Morgoth was fulfilled. The earliest versions of this story by J.R.R. Tolkien go back to the end of the First World War and the years that followed; but long afterwards, when The Lord of the Rings was finished, he wrote it anew and greatly enlarged it in complexities of motive and character: it became the dominant story in his later work on Middle-earth. But he could not bring it to a final and finished form. In this book Christopher Tolkien has constructed, after long study of the manuscripts, a coherent narrative without any editorial invention.