The Lord of the Rings Omnibus (1-3) (2 page)

That difficulty aside, just what do these books signify to ordinary readers and to Tolkien scholars? And what is ‘the history of the writing’ of a book? Simply, these volumes show in great detail the development of the story of
The Lord of the Rings
from its very earliest drafts and hasty projections through its completion. We see in the earliest materials what is very much a children’s book, a sequel to
The Hobbit,
and as the story grows through various ‘phases’, there is an increase in seriousness and depth. We see alternate branches of development, the gradual blending and merging of certain characters, and the slow emergence of the nature of the rings and of the motivations of other characters. Some of these various ideas are abandoned altogether, while others are reworked into some variant form that may or may not survive into the final version.

One could make a whole catalogue of interesting tidbits from Christopher Tolkien’s study - such as the fact that Strider was called Trotter until a very late stage in the writing of the book; that Trotter was at one time a hobbit, so named because he wore wooden shoes; that Tolkien at one point considered a romance between Aragorn and É that Tolkien wrote an epilogue to the book, tying up loose ends, but it was dropped before publication (and now appears in
Sauron Defeated);
and so on. But these developments are best appreciated when read within the context of Christopher Tolkien’s commentary rather than discussed separately.

The most significant achievement of these volumes is that they show us how Tolkien wrote and thought. Nowhere else do we see the authorial process itself at work in such detail. Tolkien’s hastiest comments about where the story might proceed, or why it can or can’t go such and such a way - these queries to himself were written out: Tolkien is literally thinking on paper. This gives an added dimension of understanding to Tolkien’s comment to Stanley Unwin in a 1963 letter that, when suffering from trouble with his shoulder and right arm, ‘I found not being able to use a pen or pencil as defeating as the loss of her beak would be to a hen.’ And we, as readers of these volumes, can share with Tolkien himself the wonder and bewilderment of new characters appearing as if from nowhere, or of some other sudden change or development, at the very moment of their emergence into the story.

I know of no other instance in literature where we have such a ‘history of the writing’ of a book, told mostly by the author himself, with all the hesitations and false paths laid out before us, sorted out, commented upon, and served up to a reader like a feast. We are shown innumerable instances in the minutest detail of the thought-process itself at work. We see the author fully absorbed in creation for its own sake. And this is all the more exceptional because this is a history not only of the unfolding of a story and its text, but of the evolution of a world. There is an additional wealth of material beyond simple narrative text. There are maps and illustrations. There are languages and writing systems, and the histories of the peoples who spoke and wrote in these systems. All of these additional materials add multiple dimensions of complexity to our appreciation of the invented world itself.

Fifty years into the published life of
The Lord of the Rings,
it seems extraordinary to me that we have not only such a masterful work of literature but also as a companion to it an unparalleled account of its writing. Our gratitude as readers goes to both of the Tolkiens, father and son.

Douglas A. Anderson

May 2004

NOTE ON THE 50
^TH
ANNIVERSARY EDITION

In this edition of
The Lord of the Rings,
prepared for the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, between three and four hundred emendations have been made following an exhaustive review of past editions and printings. The present text is based on the setting of the HarperCollins three-volume hardcover edition of 2002, which in turn was a revision of the HarperCollins reset edition of 1994. As Douglas A. Anderson comments in the preceding ‘Note on the Text’, each of those editions was itself corrected, and each also introduced new errors. At the same time, other errors survived undetected, among them some five dozen which entered as long ago as 1954, in the resetting of
The Fellowship of the Ring
published as its ‘second impression’.

That the printer had quietly reset
The Fellowship of the Ring,
and that copies had been issued without proof having been read by the author, never became known to Tolkien; while his publisher, Rayner Unwin, learned of it only thirty-eight years after the fact. Tolkien found a few of the unauthorized changes introduced in the second printing when (probably while preparing the second edition in 1965) he read a copy of the twelfth impression (1962), but thought the errors newly made. These, among others, were corrected in the course of the reprinting. Then in 1992 Eric Thompson, a reader with a keen eye for typographic detail, noticed small differences between the first and second impressions of
The Fellowship of the Ring
and called them to the attention of the present editors. About one-sixth of the errors that entered in the second printing quickly came to light. Many more were revealed only recently, when Steven M. Frisby used ingenious optical aids to make a comparison of copies of
The Lord of the Rings
in greater detail than was previously accomplished. We have gladly made full use of Mr Frisby’s results, which he has generously shared and discussed.

In the course of its fifty-year history
The Lord of the Rings
has had many such readers who have recorded changes made between its various appearances in print, both to document what has gone before and to aid in the achievement of an authoritative text. Errors or possible errors were reported to the author himself or to his publishers, and information on the textual history of the work circulated among Tolkien enthusiasts at least as early as 1966, when Banks Mebane published his ‘Prolegomena to a Variorum Tolkien’ in the fanzine
Entmoot.
Most notably in later years, Douglas A. Anderson has been in the forefront of efforts to achieve an accurate text of
The Lord of the Rings
(and of
The Hobbit);
Christina Scull has published ‘A Preliminary Study of Variations in Editions of
The Lord of the Rings’
in
Beyond Bree
(April and August 1985); Wayne G. Hammond has compiled extensive lists of textual changes in
J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography
(1993); and David Bratman has published an important article, ‘A Corrigenda to
The Lord of the Rings’,
in the March 1994 number of
The Tolkien Collector.
The observations of Dainis Bisenieks, Yuval Kfir, Charles Noad, and other readers, sent to us directly or posted in public forums, have also been of service.

Efforts such as these follow the example of the author of
The Lord of the Rings
during his lifetime. His concern for the textual accuracy and coherence of his work is evident from the many emendations he made in later printings, and from notes he made for other emendations which for one reason or another have not previously (or have only partly) been put into effect. Even late in life, when such labours wearied him, his feelings were clear. On 30 October 1967 he wrote to Joy Hill at George Allen & Unwin, concerning a reader’s query he had received about points in the Appendices to
The Lord of the Rings:
‘Personally I have ceased to bother about these minor “discrepancies”, since if the genealogies and calendars etc. lack verisimilitude it is in their general excessive accuracy: as compared with real annals or genealogies! Anyway the slips were few, have now mostly been removed, and the discovery of what remain seems an amusing pastime!
But errors in the text are another matter’
(italics ours). In fact Tolkien had not ‘ceased to bother’, and ‘slips’ were dealt with as opportunities arose. These, and the indulgence of his publisher, allowed Tolkien a luxury few authors enjoy: multiple chances not only to correct his text but to improve it, and to further develop the languages, geography, and peoples of Middle-earth.

The fiftieth anniversary of
The Lord of the Rings
seemed an ideal opportunity to consider the latest (2002) text in light of information we had gathered in the course of decades of work in Tolkien studies, with Steve Frisby’s research at hand, and with an electronic copy of
The Lord of the Rings
(supplied by HarperCollins) searchable by keyword or phrase. The latter especially allowed us to develop lists of words that varied from one instance to another, and investigate variations in usage, as they stood in the copy-text and relative to earlier editions and printings. Of course Tolkien wrote
The Lord of the Rings
over so long a period of time, some eighteen years, that inconsistencies in its text were almost inevitable. Christopher Tolkien even observed to us that some apparent inconsistencies of form in his father’s work may even have been deliberate: for instance, although Tolkien carefully distinguished
house
‘dwelling’ from
House
‘noble family or dynasty’, in two instances he used
house
in the latter sense but in lower case, perhaps because a capital letter would have detracted from the importance of the adjective with which the word was paired (‘royal house’, ‘golden house’). There can be no doubt, however, that Tolkien attempted to correct inconsistency, no less than outright error, whenever it came to his attention, and it was our opinion, with the advice and agreement of Christopher Tolkien, that an attempt should be made to do so in the anniversary edition, in so far as we could carefully and conservatively distinguish what to emend.

Many of the emendations in the present text are to marks of punctuation, either to correct recent typographical errors or to repair surviving alterations introduced in the second printing of
The Fellowship of the Ring
. In the latter respect and in every case, Tolkien’s original punctuation is always more felicitous - subtle points, when one is comparing commas and semi-colons, but no less a part of the author’s intended expression. Distinctive words such as
chill
rather than
cold
, and
glistered
rather than
glistened
, changed by typesetters long ago without authorization, likewise have been restored. A controlled amount of regularization also seemed called for, such as
naught
rather than
nought
, a change instituted by Tolkien but not carried through in all instances;
Dark Power
rather than
dark power
when the reference is obviously to Sauron (or Morgoth);
Barrow-downs
by Tolkien’s preference rather than
Barrowdowns
; likewise
Bree-hill
rather than
Bree Hill
; accented and more common
Drúeadan
rather than
Druadan
; capitalized names of seasons when used as personification or metaphor, according to Tolkien’s predominant practice and the internal logic of the text; and
Elvish
rather than
elvish
when used as a separate adjective, following a preference Tolkien marked in his copy of the second edition of
The Lord of the Rings
. In addition, we have added a second accent to
N úmenórean(s)
, as Tolkien often wrote the name in manuscript and as it appears in
The Silmarillion
and other posthumous publications.

The result, nonetheless, still includes many variations in capitalization, punctuation, and other points of style. Not all of these are erroneous: they include words such as
Sun
,
Moon
,
Hobbit
, and
Man
(or
sun
,
moon
,
hobbit
,
man
), which may change form according to meaning or application, in relation to adjacent adjectives, or whether Tolkien intended personification, poetry, or emphasis. His intent cannot be divined with confidence in every case. But it is possible to discern Tolkien’s preferences in many instances, from statements he wrote in his check copies of
The Lord of the Rings
or from a close analysis of its text in manuscript, typescript, proof, and print. Whenever there has been any doubt whatsoever as to the author’s intentions, the text has been allowed to stand.

Most of the demonstrable errors noted by Christopher Tolkien in
The History of Middle-earth
also have been corrected, such as the distance from the Brandywine Bridge to the Ferry
(ten
miles rather than
twenty)
and the number of Merry’s ponies
(five
rather than
six),
shadows of earlier drafts. But those inconsistencies of content, such as Gimli’s famous (and erroneous) statement in Book III, Chapter 7, ‘Till now I have hewn naught but wood since I left Moria’, which would require rewriting to emend rather than simple correction, remain unchanged.

So many new emendations to
The Lord of the Rings,
and such an extensive review of its text, deserve to be fully documented. Although most readers will be content with the text alone, many will want to know more about the problems encountered in preparing this new edition, and their solutions (where solutions have been possible), especially where the text has been emended, but also where it has not. To this end, and to illuminate the work in other respects, we are preparing a volume of annotations to
The Lord of the Rings
for publication in 2005. This will allow us to discuss, at a length impossible in a prefatory note, the various textual cruces of
The Lord of the Rings,
to identify changes that have been made to the present text, and to remark on significant alterations to the published work throughout its history. We will also explain archaic or unusual words and names in
The Lord of the Rings,
explore literary and historical influences, note connections with Tolkien’s other writings, and comment on differences between its drafts and published form, on questions of language, and on much else that we hope will interest readers and enhance their enjoyment of Tolkien’s masterpiece.

Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull

May 2004