J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment

It gives an overabundance of websites as reference, which is never a good sign. Also, it gives a lots of credit to many obscure papers written by unknown young people in fanzines published in the 1970's and which no one can find in any Library. There are lots, and lots of errors, like: "Maiar, an order of semi divine spirits created to assist the Valar". The Maiar are nothing near to be semi- or half-, but are quite "fully divine". We are not in Tolkien's Secondary World in some Neo-Greek mythology. The Maiar were not created to serve, either. The Maiar writes Tolkien: "Maiar was applied to all the angelic spirits created by Eru before the making of Eä" (Words, Phrases and Passages, p. 163). These "angelic spirits" have free-will. This encyclopaedia has serious flaws: there is no entry Philology, a very bad article is to be found under "Comparative philology" under "Language, and theories of"; and nothing (or almost) is said about Guy Gavriel Kay, who helped Christopher Tolkien to edit "The Silmarillion".