The Treason of Isengard

The Treason of Isengard is not a story but a book about the making of one. It is an editorial volume of several hundred pages in which Christopher Tolkien sets out, chapter by chapter, the surviving manuscript and typescript stages behind a stretch of The Lord of the Rings, each body of draft text followed by numbered notes and by a commentary that relates the drafts to one another and to the published book. It stands second among the four volumes of The History of Middle-earth given over to that composition, taking up the sequence begun in The Return of the Shadow and continuing the running chapter numbering established there. Alongside the narrative drafts the volume carries supplementary matter of a documentary kind, including material on the earliest maps drawn for the work, and it closes with an index of the sort supplied throughout the series. No German edition exists; the English title is therefore also the citation form used here.

The manner of presentation is that of a textual edition rather than a retelling. The editor speaks in his own voice and in the third person, describing the physical state of the papers, the order in which they were written, the difficulties of dating them, and the points at which a reading is uncertain; where he cannot decide, he says so. Draft text is given as it stands, with its inconsistencies and its abandoned names left intact, and the commentary is kept formally separate from it, so that the reader can always tell what belongs to the author and what to the edition. The tone is measured and unhurried, and the volume never argues that an earlier version is better or worse than what replaced it; it records the sequence and leaves judgement aside.

Its readership is accordingly a particular one. The book assumes that its reader already knows the finished narrative well enough to recognise where a draft departs from it, and it offers little to anyone approaching Middle-earth for the first time. Within the legendarium it occupies a documentary rather than a narrative place: the writings it prints were superseded by their author and carry no authority against the published text, whose own long and interrupted making Tolkien described in the foreword he added to the second edition. What the volume preserves is the record of that labour — the false starts, the renamings, and the slow settling of a story that had begun as something else.

The drafts gathered in the volume can be placed in time with unusual confidence, because their author set out the stages of the work himself in retrospect. The sequel to The Hobbit was taken up late in the 1930s, and by the end of 1939 the narrative had still not reached Balin's tomb in Moria; a further stop followed. The first drafts of the matter that became Book III were written in 1942, and the writing halted again at the point where the beacons were kindled in Anórien and Théoden rode to Harrowdale, the story having outrun its author's foresight. Everything edited in this volume falls between those two markers, so that what the edition reconstructs is a few years of intermittent labour spread across a much longer stretch of calendar time, with the resumption of the tale still some way off.

The title of the volume is not an editorial coinage but a phrase of Tolkien's own, and one he had proposed for a different purpose. When the completed work was being prepared for publication in three volumes in 1953, he wrote to his publisher offering names for the six internal books, since the division into volumes seemed to him arbitrary and the books the truer units; among the names he suggested was the one later fixed to this volume, assigned to the third book. The published text in the event left the six books numbered and untitled, so that the proposed names survived only in the correspondence. Several of them were afterwards taken up as titles in the History series, this volume and the one following it among them.

The edition itself was made in the 1980s, at a point when the History of Middle-earth had already run through six volumes and had reached the end of the material belonging to the Elder Days. The account of The Lord of the Rings was then carried through four consecutive volumes, each subtitled as one part of that sub-sequence: The Return of the Shadow in 1988, the present volume in 1989, The War of the Ring in 1990, and Sauron Defeated in 1992. The forewords to those volumes explain where the divisions between them fall and why the editor judged the papers worth printing at such length, the manuscripts having proved far more extensive and more tangled than the plan of the series had originally allowed for. The near-annual pace is visible in the volumes themselves, each taking up the numbering and the conventions of the last without restating them.

Publication in 1989 was by the Allen & Unwin house, Tolkien's British publisher since The Hobbit, with an American edition following in the same year; the list passed shortly afterwards to HarperCollins, under whose imprint the later printings and the collected sets of the series have appeared. The text has not been revised: subsequent issues reproduce the edition of 1989, and the volume has been reprinted rather than re-edited. The account of the composition of The Lord of the Rings was not, however, closed by the fourth of these volumes. The drafts of the Prologue and of the Appendices were held back and printed instead at the opening of The Peoples of Middle-earth in 1996, the twelfth and last volume of the series, so that the documentary record begun in the seventh volume's predecessor is completed only at the very end of the sequence.

A foreword opens the book and sets out what it covers, how the material has been divided, and where the line falls between this instalment and the one before it. The body is then arranged in three parts, of which the outer two carry narrative drafts and the middle one stands apart from the story altogether. The drafts run in the order in which they were written rather than in the order of the finished book, and they complete first the second of the six books of The Lord of the Rings — the renewed work on the opening chapters, the long and much-rewritten Council at Rivendell, the descent into Moria, the coming to Lothlórien, the passage down the great river, and the breaking of the Company — and then take up the third book, with the pursuit across the plains of Rohan, the captivity among the orcs, Fangorn and Treebeard, the return of Gandalf, the hall of Théoden, the fighting at the Hornburg, the ride to Isengard and the parley there, and the seeing-stone.

Interleaved with the drafts are documents of another kind, and the reader looking for them should not expect them at the end. Short outlines in which the author projected the tale ahead of what he had written are printed at the points where they belong chronologically, several of them named for the place the story had reached when they were set down, as with the sketches made from Lothlórien and from Fangorn; they show plans that were afterwards abandoned. Notes on chronology, on the reckoning of days and moons, and on names and their meanings are gathered where they arise, and one chapter is given over to miscellaneous matter of that sort. The middle part of the volume holds the earliest map made for the work, redrawn by the editor from an original that had been altered and overlaid many times, with an account of its successive layers, of the grid of squares by which distances were reckoned, and of the place-names it carries that never reached the published map.

After the last of the narrative chapters comes an appendix on runes, which prints and discusses the runic alphabets as they stood at this stage, together with the letter-values assigned to them and the changes made to that system before it was fixed in the published appendices. The volume ends with a full index of names and subjects, covering both the forms used in the drafts and those of the finished book and linking the one to the other by cross-reference; because the chapters follow the order of composition, this index, rather than the sequence of chapter titles, is the practical means of finding what the volume says about any given episode or person. Readers should also note that the record here is not self-contained at either end: the earliest drafts of the opening chapters were printed in the preceding volume, and the drafting of the later chapters of the third book runs on into the volume that follows.

Everything the volume prints stands on the far side of a line its author drew when he released the finished work, and the relation between the two is not one of rival versions. The published narrative is the sole authority for what happens in the story; a draft that gives a person a different name, or sets an encounter in another place, does not qualify that narrative but only shows that it had a history. The same holds for the reckoning of time. The day-by-day scheme of the events in question was fixed only in the chronicle appended to the published book, and the chronological workings preserved among these papers are attempts at a system not yet settled, several of them incompatible with the dates that were finally adopted. Read in that light the drafts carry no evidential weight about Middle-earth and a good deal about its making.

The stretch of the tale documented here is also the stretch in which the new story bound itself to the older mythology, and this gives the volume a particular position among the books that record the legendarium. Tolkien himself described the two bodies of writing — the ancient legends and the long sequel — as having grown into one another and as unfit for separate publication, and pressed for them to appear together; the account he gave of that interdependence in his long letter to a prospective publisher remains the clearest statement of it in his own words. What the drafts of this period exhibit is the process behind that claim rather than the claim itself: names, peoples and events belonging to the earlier matter enter the narrative present of the sequel while the sequel is still being felt out. The volume is therefore of interest chiefly to readers of the older legends as well as of the later book.

Against the same matter there also stands a body of writing that runs in the opposite direction in time. The later essays and narratives on Rohan and Isengard, on the fighting at the fords of the Isen, and on the seeing-stones and their governance were composed after the published book existed and take it as given, elaborating what it had left compressed; they were gathered posthumously in Unfinished Tales. Where those pieces expand the finished account from the far side, the drafts edited in this volume approach the same episodes from before, and the two must not be read as though they belonged to one shelf. Neither displaces the published text, but the later writings extend it while the earlier ones were discarded in reaching it.

One further relation is worth marking, because it belongs to the years of drafting rather than to the years of editing. While these chapters were being written the earlier book still stood as first published, with its account of how the Ring was come by unaltered; the version of that chapter which agrees with the sequel was made afterwards, and the discrepancy between the two accounts was in the end explained within the story itself, in the introductory matter prefixed to the published work. The drafts gathered here thus fall in the interval between the two states of the earlier book, at a point where the sequel had already outgrown what it was a sequel to.

Since its first appearance the volume's history has been one of reissue rather than revision. It was published in hardback and afterwards in paperback, and once the series was complete the twelve volumes were gathered by HarperCollins into three omnibus parts, also sold as a boxed set, this book falling in the middle part together with the other volumes given to the drafts of The Lord of the Rings. A further book was issued in 2002 which brings the indexes of all twelve volumes into a single alphabetical sequence, so that the index printed here exists in a consolidated form as well as in its original place. The pagination of the first edition remains the form in which the volume is ordinarily cited, and short references to it commonly use the series numeral rather than the title.

Translation has been uneven across languages. There is no German edition: of the whole series only the two parts of The Book of Lost Tales were carried into German, by Klett-Cotta, and the volumes from the third onward were not, so that German-language writing on the subject cites this one under its English title. In French the corresponding volumes were published by Christian Bourgois in translations by Daniel Lauzon, and a Spanish series appeared from Minotauro; in both the title of this volume was rendered rather than kept. Where a translation exists it follows the 1989 text, the editorial matter included, since no revised original has been made for it to follow.

Within the study of Tolkien's writing the volume has functioned chiefly as a source of documents rather than as a book read through. Its chapter on the earliest map is the only published form of that material, and its account of the runic alphabets at this stage is likewise not available elsewhere; both are drawn on by anyone working on the cartography or the writing systems. The editor himself referred back to it in the volumes that followed, and the record it opens was completed only with the twelfth, so that its standing depends on the sequence around it rather than on the single book.