The book has an attractive cover, a tempting title and the text is nicely laid out with helpful chapter titles and sub-headings, charts, colour plates, illustrations, notes, references, appendices, bibliography and index. This all seems very encouraging and confidence inspiring. However, I purchased the book because of my fondness for Tolkien's tales of Middle Earth and not because I'm interested in grail conjectures. It doesn't take long (page 3) to reach an interesting section headed "Tolkien's Ring". I was dismayed to find no fewer than 12 errors in this short (2-page) section. No doubt I've read 'The Hobbit', 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'The Silmarillion' more times than seems entirely well balanced and that's why all Mr Laurence Gardner's inaccuracies jumped out at me. I won't bore you by listing them all but I will mention that Mr Gardner is under the impression that Bilbo stole the ring from Gollum, he has The White Council and The Council of Elrond confused, he believes Aragorn was already King of Gondor when the 4 hobbits first met him, that Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli just abandoned their search for Merry and Pippin and made for Gondor instead and met Gandalf on their way there ... and so on. The point is, that if Mr Gardner can't even give an accurate account of a story that's so easily available for checking, how can we trust anything he says regarding the poorly documented and undocumented history, myths and legends of hundreds or thousands of years ago? If he read or consulted the other books in his impressive looking bibliography with the same care and attention he gave to Tolkien's work, is it worth reading his book at all? Personally, I like to keep fact and fiction in separate categories in my mind because that saves a lot of confusion. This book is not presented as a work of fiction but by page 5 I was fully satisfied that its "facts" could not be trusted because the author is clearly a very careless researcher.
Not recommended.