The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings is a single long novel that its publisher issued in three instalments across 1954 and 1955, a division Tolkien accepted for commercial reasons rather than one he designed. Beneath the familiar volume titles the work is organised into six books of roughly equal weight, two to a volume, each carrying its own chapter sequence; the volume break therefore falls in the middle of the narrative rather than at a natural joint. A substantial body of appendices closes the whole, supplying annals of the earlier Ages, royal and hobbit genealogies, calendars, and notes on the writing systems and languages of Middle-earth. These are not ornament but apparatus: they turn a continuous story into something a reader can cross-reference.

The narrative voice is that of a chronicler working from documents rather than of an omniscient storyteller. A prologue introduces the hobbits, their land and their habits to an audience assumed to know nothing of them, and describes the manuscript tradition — the Red Book of Westmarch and its copies — from which the account is said to derive. The effect is a framed history: the book presents itself as a translation and compilation, with a translator's decisions about names and calendars made explicit in the appendices. Tone shifts markedly across the six books, from the domestic comedy of the opening chapters to a high and formal register in the later ones, and verse is set within the prose throughout, attributed to particular singers and traditions.

Within the legendarium the book stands as the latest and fullest of the tales, set at the close of the Third Age, and it presupposes the elder matter without expounding it. Older names and events surface in songs, in the speech of the Elves, and in the appendices, so that the earlier Ages are visible as depth rather than narrated as plot; the fuller versions of that material appeared only after Tolkien's death. He described the intention as the making of a body of connected legend, and remarked on the way the work grew from a sequel to a children's book into something of another order. It is addressed to an adult reader, and it assumes patience: the geography, the chronology and the naming reward attention but are never summarised for convenience.

The book was begun in December 1937, within months of the appearance of The Hobbit, when Tolkien's publisher asked him for a further story about hobbits. In the foreword he prepared for the second edition he set out the shape of the work that followed: a composition carried on in stages over more than a decade, broken by long halts in which nothing was added, and slowed further by his professional duties and by the years of the Second World War. He recorded that the narrative stood still at several points for a year or more before he found the way onward, and that the tale reached its end in 1949, with the apparatus at the back still unfinished. Another five years passed before the first volume was in the hands of readers. He also noted, drily, that the story had outgrown the intention with which it was started, and that he had not planned its length in advance.

Tolkien's letters preserve his own running account of the labour. Writing to W. H. Auden in 1955 he described the slow progress of the work through the war years, the chapters sent out to his son Christopher while the latter was serving abroad, and the fact that he had typed the great mass of text himself rather than employ a professional. The long letter of about 1951 to Milton Waldman, written to persuade another publisher to take on his work, presents the finished book as one half of a pair: he wanted the tales of the Elder Days to appear together with it, as two parts of a single connected body of legend, and for a time he pressed that condition rather than see the newer book published alone. Those negotiations came to nothing, and the manuscript returned to George Allen & Unwin, who had commissioned the sequel in the first place. Tolkien remained conscious that the compromise left the earlier matter unpublished.

Allen & Unwin brought out the three volumes in London at intervals across fourteen months. The Fellowship of the Ring appeared on 29 July 1954 and The Two Towers on 11 November of the same year; The Return of the King followed only on 20 October 1955. The delay to the last volume was caused chiefly by the closing apparatus, which Tolkien was still compiling and compressing after the earlier volumes were in print, and by a promised index that was cut back and finally set aside. He remarked afterwards that the material had to be reduced far below what he had prepared, and that some of what readers asked for most persistently had been squeezed out. An American edition from Houghton Mifflin followed the British printings.

A decade later the text was revised. The occasion was an American paperback issued in 1965 without the author's agreement, which prompted a corrected and authorised paperback in the same year and, in 1966, a second edition from the British publisher. Tolkien used the opportunity to amend errors and inconsistencies in the narrative and in the appendices, and replaced the original foreword of 1954 with a new one that discusses the writing of the book and dismisses attempts to read it as allegory of the recent war. Later resettings of the type introduced fresh errors and fresh corrections in turn; the edition published for the fiftieth anniversary in 2004, prepared by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, carried the most thorough editorial revision of the text since the author's own. Its accompanying note on the text sets out that history in detail.

In German the book is published by the Stuttgart house J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger in the translation of Margaret Carroux, with the verse rendered by E.-M. von Freymann and a supplementary chapter on pronunciation translated by Helmut W. Pesch; the edition consulted here was newly revised by Lisa Kuppler and is dated 2009/2010. The same house issues Wolfgang Krege’s German Hobbit, so a reader comparing German name forms across the Middle-earth books may be comparing two translating hands rather than one.

The text proper is preceded by a prologue in four numbered sections, which treat in turn the hobbits as a people, their pipe-weed, the government of the Shire, and the finding of the Ring as hobbit tradition preserved it; a short note on the Shire records was added at the second edition. Of the six books that follow, the first two make up The Fellowship of the Ring, running to twelve and ten chapters respectively. Book III and Book IV, of eleven and ten chapters, form The Two Towers, and Book V and Book VI, of ten and nine, form The Return of the King. From the third book onward the narrative divides: the odd-numbered books follow the scattered company and the wider war, the even-numbered ones the two hobbits travelling east. The strands run concurrently rather than consecutively, so that the story doubles back in time at each change of book, and dates that seem to move forward within a book may overlap heavily across them.

Six appendices, lettered A to F, close the last volume. Appendix A gathers annals of the kings and rulers, divided between the Númenórean line and its realms in exile, the House of Eorl in Rohan, and Durin's folk among the Dwarves, and includes a continuous tale of Aragorn and Arwen which is told nowhere in the narrative itself. Appendix B, the Tale of Years, is a chronology of the western lands covering the Second and Third Ages and continuing past the end of the story; it is the readiest instrument for reconstructing the order of events across the divided books. Appendix C prints family trees of the principal hobbit households, Appendix D explains the calendars in use among hobbits, Númenóreans and Elves together with the reckoning of days and months, Appendix E treats pronunciation and the two scripts of Middle-earth, the tengwar and the runic cirth, and Appendix F describes the languages and peoples of the Third Age and sets out, under the heading of translation, the conventions by which the supposed originals have been rendered into English.

Maps accompany the volumes and are meant to be consulted rather than admired. A general map of the western lands at the end of the Third Age covers the whole ground of the journey; a separate large-scale map of the Shire, placed with the opening volume, shows the farthings, villages and roads named in the first book; and a further map of Rohan, Gondor and Mordor serves the later volumes, where the movements of armies are described in terms of distances and days. The title pages carry inscriptions in tengwar and cirth which state the title and authorship of the work, and which Appendix E equips the reader to decipher. Taken together, prologue, maps and appendices form a reference apparatus around a continuous narrative that itself explains very little: names, dates and lineages mentioned once in passing are commonly resolved only at the back of the book.

Its nearest neighbour is The Hobbit, of which it is the declared sequel, and the relation between the two is not a simple one. The earlier book presents the ring Bilbo finds under the mountains as a piece of luck with a convenient property; the later one makes it the object on which the fate of an age turns, and in doing so it obliges the earlier account to have been wrong. Tolkien resolved the difficulty from inside the fiction as well as outside it. The prologue and the long debate at Rivendell both report that Bilbo first set down an untrue version of the finding, in which the creature had offered the ring as a stake fairly lost, and that he gave the true account only later; the false version is itself explained as an effect of the Ring on the one who carried it. The revised text of the earlier book was brought into line at the same period, so that a reader coming from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings today meets the corrected story twice.

For the ages that lie behind it, the book is the only witness the author himself put into print. The war it narrates is set out as the last act of a far longer history: the forging of the Rings, the drowning of Númenor, the founding of the two kingdoms in exile and the slow failure of both are given in summary, chiefly in the annals at the back and in the speech of characters old enough to remember. The elder legends enter more obliquely still — Aragorn tells the tale of Beren and Lúthien on the road east of Bree, a song of Eärendil is sung in the house of Elrond, and Elvish laments name persons and places that the narrative never pauses to explain. In this form the material is allusion rather than account. But it is allusion that Tolkien saw through the press, and it fixes names, outlines and dates that all later work on the legendarium has had to accommodate.

Everything fuller came afterwards and at one remove. The Silmarillion of 1977 supplies the Elder Days at length and closes with a connected account of the Rings and of the Third Age that runs down to the point at which the novel opens; Unfinished Tales of 1980 sets further pieces beside the narrative, among them the coming of the Wizards, the earlier history of Lothlórien and its lady, and the death of Isildur. Both are edited books, assembled from manuscripts of differing dates, and their editor says as much in his introductions. The resulting frictions lie mostly between the posthumous texts and one another, or between a late conception and an earlier one, rather than between them and the volumes of 1954–55; the history of Galadriel is the clearest case, surviving in several versions that cannot all stand together. Where a disagreement does reach the published novel, this encyclopedia takes the K1 text as the standing form and records the K2 reading as a variant. The layers are not a judgement of quality but a measure of distance from what the author released.

By the time Tolkien came to write a new foreword for the second edition, the book had accumulated a decade of published comment, and he set down there his own summary of it. Some who had read the work, or at least reviewed it, had found it tedious, absurd or beneath notice; others had taken it quite differently, and he observed drily that he held no higher opinion of the kind of writing his detractors evidently preferred. Beyond that he declined to answer reviewers point by point, using the space instead to correct what he regarded as misreadings of the story's bearing and purpose. Those few sentences are the closest thing to a public response to criticism that he allowed into the book itself; the fuller record of what he made of its reception lies in his correspondence.

Translation began early and at once raised the difficulty that the appendices had anticipated: a text presented as a rendering out of other tongues into English does not survive a second rendering intact. When a Dutch version was in hand within two years of the final volume, Tolkien saw what had been done to the nomenclature and wrote to his publisher in 1956 objecting in principle to translating the names at all. He argued that the map of the Shire and the names upon it formed a deliberate English-language pattern that could not simply be replaced with equivalents, and asked that the work not go forward on those terms until the point was settled, while allowing that a translator who understood the system might legitimately render some elements of it. The exchange set the pattern for his dealings with later translators, and lies behind the guidance on the treatment of names that he afterwards drew up for their use.

Interest from other media followed within a few years. A film proposal reached Tolkien in the late 1950s together with a written story treatment, and in 1958 he composed a long commentary working through it in sequence. He objected to the compression of the journey and the rearrangement of its stages, to episodes introduced that had no place in the narrative, to the use of the eagles as a general means of transport, and to the renaming of Saruman on the grounds that readers might confuse him with Sauron. He drew a distinction he was to repeat afterwards: abridgement he accepted as unavoidable in another medium, alteration of the substance he did not. The project went no further, but the commentary stands as the earliest detailed statement of his terms for adaptation.