Welcome to HoMe Base

This site is intended to be the hub of the Digital Tolkien Project’s work on The History of Middle-earth series edited by Christopher Tolkien. We are at an early stage of development, working on The Book of Lost Tales (‘transversely’) and the Music of the Ainur / Ainulindalë (‘longitudinally’) although dipping into other volumes and chapters as research questions arise. Our goal is to provide a foundation for education and scholarship with an initial focus on metadata, search, data models, bibliography, and citation systems.

We are ‘working with the garage door open’ which means much of what appears here is provisional and incomplete. We welcome feedback and suggestions as we continue to develop the site.

Please contact us if we can assist in your research in any way.

Getting Started

1

Understand the Data Model and Text Type Examples

Understand how we are structuring and categorizing the component texts.

2

Try Out Search HoMe

Search within P-texts in Volumes 1–6, 10, 11, and 12 or group results by text type in The Music of the Ainur.

3

Browse Information on Volumes and Chapters

Browse through the information we’re gathering on each volume and chapter.

4

Check Status

See the progress on particular tasks for each volume and chapter.

5

Explore Articles Like the Lost Tales Frame Timeline

The first of many articles planned on specific topics relating to the series.

Recent Updates

2026-09-29

Fixed citations in the Music of the Ainur Search, where the rows of a table, the numbered notes, and one other passage were cited as if they were paragraphs 3–15 of the chapter; they are now cited within their paragraph, such as 01.02.087.11 for note 11. Footnotes are now searchable too (e.g. 01.02.003.fn1), and the search follows the latest text type designations

2026-09-29

Added page numbers to Search results and CSV export, showing the page (or pages) each match is on, for both the P-Text and Music of the Ainur searches

2026-09-29

Corrected the page numbers of 21 paragraphs on the P-Text pages for Volumes 4 and 5, such as 04:P8.004 in the Annals of Valinor, which begins on page 263, not 264

2026-09-18

Fixed Search indexing that joined the words either side of a paragraph or line break, making both unfindable; 75 occurrences are now searchable, most of them in the Annals in The Shaping of Middle-earth

2026-09-17

Fixed Search results for Volumes 3, 6, 10, and 11 so citations link to the P-Text pages