HarperCollins has officially announced a Deluxe Illustrated Edition of The Fall of Numenor and Other Tales from the Second Age of Middle-earth, due out on November 10, 2026, and can already be pre-ordered at Amazon.com. The edition features artwork by Alan Lee and is designed to match HarperCollins’ existing illustrated hardcover series covering The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion.
The Fall of Númenor Special Edition
The volume was compiled by Brian Sibley, who drew on texts already familiar to Tolkien readers: the Second Age material in The Silmarillion and “The Tale of Years” from the appendices to The Lord of the Rings. Sibley arranged that material in strict chronological order, giving readers a continuous narrative of the Second Age without the need to cross-reference multiple books. The content is not new, but the presentation is different from anything in print.
Alan Lee’s involvement Follows in the tradition of other special editions, particularly the Children of Hurin. Where the earlier illustrated editions of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit incorporated Tolkien’s own drawings, The Fall of Numenor edition relies entirely on Lee’s watercolors. Lee has illustrated Tolkien’s work since 1991, and his images for those earlier deluxe volumes helped define what many readers picture when they think of Middle-earth. His paintings of Numenor, the forging of the Rings of Power, and the War of the Last Alliance will be new contributions to that canon.
The Second Age material Sibley compiled covers the full sweep of that history: the Elves of Eregion forging the Rings of Power under Sauron’s guidance, Sauron’s secret construction of Barad-dur and the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom, the rise of Numenor as a sea power, and the eventual downfall of the island when its kings turned against the Valar. This is the same period Amazon’s The Rings of Power has been adapting, and the release date of November 10 is one day before The Rings of Power Season 3 debuts on Prime Video on November 11. The overlap is not a coincidence.
For readers who want Tolkien’s own words alongside the show, this edition is the closest option available. The texts are canonical, drawn from Tolkien’s published work, and the chronological arrangement makes the Second Age more readable as a single story than hunting across appendices and chapters of The Silmarillion. That Sibley, a longtime Tolkien collaborator, did the editorial work adds some confidence that the sequencing is sound.
