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closing two sentences of ‘TheCouncil of Elrond’ simplyand inexplicably disappeared.Such glitches have been verymuch the exception, not therule, and the text hasotherwise maintained aconsistency and integritythroughout its computerizedevolution.The 1994 edition alsocontained a number of newcorrections (again supervised

by Christopher Tolkien), aswell as a reconfigured indexof names and page references.The 1994 text was first usedin American editionspublished by HoughtonMifflin in 1999. A smallnumber of further correctionswere added into the 2002three-volume editionillustrated by Alan Lee,published by HarperCollins inGreat Britain and Houghton

Mifflin in the United States.The textual history of TheLord of the Rings, merely inits published form, is a vastand complex web. In thisbrief note I have given only aglimpse of the overallsequence and structure.Further details on therevisions and correctionsmade over the years to the

published text of The Lord ofthe Rings, and a fulleraccount of its publishinghistory, may be found inJ.R.R. Tolkien: A DescriptiveBibliography, by Wayne G.Hammond, with theassistance of Douglas A.Anderson (1993).For those interested inobserving the gradualevolving of The Lord of theRings from its earliest drafts

to its published form, I highlyrecommend ChristopherTolkien’s account, whichappears within five volumesof his twelve-volume seriesThe History of Middle-earth.Volumes six through ninecontain the major part of hisstudy pertaining to The Lordof the Rings: The Return ofthe Shadow (1988); TheTreason ofIsengard (1989);The War of the Ring (1990);

and Sauron Defeated (1992).Also, the final book of theseries, The Peoples ofMiddle-earth (1996), coversthe evolution of the prologueand appendices to The Lordof the Rings. These volumescontain an engrossing overthe-shoulder account of thegrowth and writing ofTolkien’s masterpiece.The process of studyingTolkien’s manuscripts of The

Lord of the Rings involvedthe deciphering of versionswhere Tolkien wrote first inpencil and then in ink atopthe pencilled draft.Christopher Tolkien hasdecribed his father’s methodof composition in The Returnof the Shadow: ‘In thehandwriting that he used forrapid drafts and sketches, notintended to endure longbefore he turned to them

again and gave them a moreworkable form, letters are soloosely formed that a wordwhich cannot be deduced orguessed at from the context orfrom later versions can proveperfectly opaque after longexamination; and if, as heoften did, he used a softpencil much has now becomeblurred and faint.’ The truedifficulty of reading suchdouble-drafts can be observed

in the frontispiece to The Warof the Ring, which reproducesin colour Tolkien’sillustration of ‘Shelob’s Lair’from a page of Tolkien’smanuscript. Looking veryclosely at the hasty ink draftalongside the illustration, onecan see underneath it theearlier, hastier, pencilleddraft. Also in The War of theRing, Christopher Tolkienreproduces a page from the

first manuscript of the chapter‘The Taming of Sméagol’,and the printed textcorresponding to this text ison the facing page (see pp.90–91). One is astonished atanyone’s ability to deciphersuch texts.That difficulty aside, justwhat do these books signifyto ordinary readers and toTolkien scholars? And whatis ‘the history of the writing’

of a book? Simply, thesevolumes show in great detailthe development of the storyof The Lord of the Rings fromits very earliest drafts andhasty projections through itscompletion. We see in theearliest materials what is verymuch a children’s book, asequel to The Hobbit, and asthe story grows throughvarious ‘phases’, there is anincrease in seriousness and

depth. We see alternatebranches of development, thegradual blending and mergingof certain characters, and theslow emergence of the natureof the rings and of themotivations of othercharacters. Some of thesevarious ideas are abandonedaltogether, while others arereworked into some variantform that may or may notsurvive into the final version.

One could make a wholecatalogue of interestingtidbits from ChristopherTolkien’s study – such as thefact that Strider was calledTrotter until a very late stagein the writing of the book;that Trotter was at one time ahobbit, so named because hewore wooden shoes; thatTolkien at one pointconsidered a romancebetween Aragorn and Éowyn;

that Tolkien wrote anepilogue to the book, tying uploose ends, but it wasdropped before publication(and now appears in SauronDefeated); and so on. Butthese developments are bestappreciated when read withinthe context of ChristopherTolkien’s commentary ratherthan discussed separately.The most significantachievement of these volumes

is that they show us howTolkien wrote and thought.Nowhere else do we see theauthorial process itself atwork in such detail. Tolkien’shastiest comments aboutwhere the story mightproceed, or why it can orcan’t go such and such a way– these queries to himselfwere written out: Tolkien isliterally thinking on paper.This gives an added

dimension of understandingto Tolkien’s comment toStanley Unwin in a 1963letter that, when sufferingfrom trouble with hisshoulder and right arm, ‘Ifound not being able to use apen or pencil as defeating asthe loss of her beak would beto a hen.’ And we, as readersof these volumes, can sharewith Tolkien himself thewonder and bewilderment of

new characters appearing asif from nowhere, or of someother sudden change ordevelopment, at the verymoment of their emergenceinto the story.I know of no otherinstance in literature wherewe have such a ‘history of thewriting’ of a book, toldmostly by the author himself,with all the hesitations andfalse paths laid out before us,

sorted out, commented upon,and served up to a reader likea feast. We are showninnumerable instances in theminutest detail of thethought-process itself atwork. We see the author fullyabsorbed in creation for itsown sake. And this is all themore exceptional because thisis a history not only of theunfolding of a story and itstext, but of the evolution of a

world. There is an additionalwealth of material beyondsimple narrative text. Thereare maps and illustrations.There are languages andwriting systems, and thehistories of the peoples whospoke and wrote in thesesystems. All of theseadditional materials addmultiple dimensions ofcomplexity to ourappreciation of the invented

world itself.Fifty years into thepublished life of The Lord ofthe Rings, it seemsextraordinary to me that wehave not only such amasterful work of literaturebut also as a companion to itan unparalleled account of itswriting. Our gratitude asreaders goes to both of theTolkiens, father and son.

Douglas A. AndersonMay 2004

NOTE ON THE 50THANNIVERSARYEDITION

In this edition of The Lord ofthe Rings, prepared for thefiftieth anniversary of itspublication, between threeand four hundredemendations have been madefollowing an exhaustivereview of past editions andprintings. The present text isbased on the setting of theHarperCollins three-volumehardcover edition of 2002,which in turn was a revision

of the HarperCollins resetedition of 1994. As DouglasA. Anderson comments in thepreceding ‘Note on the Text’,each of those editions wasitself corrected, and each alsointroduced new errors. At thesame time, other errorssurvived undetected, amongthem some five dozen whichentered as long ago as 1954,in the resetting of TheFellowship of the Ring

published as its ‘secondimpression’.That the printer hadquietly reset The Fellowshipof the Ring, and that copieshad been issued without proofhaving been read by theauthor, never became knownto Tolkien; while hispublisher, Rayner Unwin,learned of it only thirty-eightyears after the fact. Tolkienfound a few of the

unauthorized changesintroduced in the secondprinting when (probablywhile preparing the secondedition in 1965) he read acopy of the twelfthimpression (1962), butthought the errors newlymade. These, among others,were corrected in the courseof the reprinting. Then in1992 Eric Thompson, areader with a keen eye for

typographic detail, noticedsmall differences between thefirst and second impressionsof The Fellowship of the Ringand called them to theattention of the presenteditors. About one-sixth ofthe errors that entered in thesecond printing quickly cameto light. Many more wererevealed only recently, whenSteven M. Frisby usedingenious optical aids to

make a comparison of copiesof The Lord of the Rings ingreater detail than waspreviously accomplished. Wehave gladly made full use ofMr Frisby’s results, which hehas generously shared anddiscussed.In the course of its fiftyyear history The Lord of theRings has had many suchreaders who have recordedchanges made between its

various appearances in print,both to document what hasgone before and to aid in theachievement of anauthoritative text. Errors orpossible errors were reportedto the author himself or to hispublishers, and informationon the textual history of thework circulated amongTolkien enthusiasts at least asearly as 1966, when BanksMebane published his

‘Prolegomena to a VariorumTolkien’ in the fanzineEntmoot. Most notably inlater years, Douglas A.Anderson has been in theforefront of efforts to achievean accurate text of The Lordof the Rings (and of TheHobbit); Christina Scull haspublished ‘A PreliminaryStudy of Variations inEditions of The Lord of theRings’ in Beyond Bree (April

and August 1985); Wayne G.Hammond has compiledextensive lists of textualchanges in J.R.R. Tolkien: ADescriptive Bibliography(1993); and David Bratmanhas published an importantarticle, ‘A Corrigenda to TheLord of the Rings’, in theMarch 1994 number of TheTolkien Collector. Theobservations of DainisBisenieks, Yuval Welis,

Charles Noad, and otherreaders, sent to us directly orposted in public forums, havealso been of service.Efforts such as thesefollow the example of theauthor of The Lord of theRings during his lifetime. Hisconcern for the textualaccuracy and coherence of hiswork is evident from themany emendations he madein later printings, and from

notes he made for otheremendations which for onereason or another have notpreviously (or have onlypartly) been put into effect.Even late in life, when suchlabours wearied him, hisfeelings were clear. On 30October 1967 he wrote to JoyHill at George Allen &Unwin, concerning a reader’squery he had received aboutpoints in the Appendices to

The Lord of the Rings:‘Personally I have ceased tobother about these minor“discrepancies”, since if thegenealogies and calendarsetc. lack verisimilitude it is intheir general excessiveaccuracy: as compared withreal annals or genealogies!Anyway the slips were few,have now mostly beenremoved, and the discoveryof what remain seems an

amusing pastime! But errorsin the text are another matter’(italics ours). In fact Tolkienhad not ‘ceased to bother’,and ‘slips’ were dealt with asopportunities arose. These,and the indulgence of hispublisher, allowed Tolkien aluxury few authors enjoy:multiple chances not only tocorrect his text but to improveit, and to further develop thelanguages, geography, and

peoples of Middle-earth.The fiftieth anniversary ofThe Lord of the Rings seemedan ideal opportunity toconsider the latest (2002) textin light of information we hadgathered in the course ofdecades of work in Tolkienstudies, with Steve Frisby’sresearch at hand, and with anelectronic copy of The Lordof the Rings (supplied byHarperCollins) searchable by

keyword or phrase. The latterespecially allowed us todevelop lists of words thatvaried from one instance toanother, and investigatevariations in usage, as theystood in the copy-text andrelative to earlier editions andprintings. Of course Tolkienwrote The Lord of the Ringsover so long a period of time,some eighteen years, thatinconsistencies in its text

were almost inevitable.Christopher Tolkien evenobserved to us that someapparent inconsistencies ofform in his father’s work mayeven have been deliberate: forinstance, although Tolkiencarefully distinguished house‘dwelling’ from House ‘noblefamily or dynasty’, in twoinstances he used house in thelatter sense but in lower case,perhaps because a capital

letter would have detractedfrom the importance of theadjective with which theword was paired (‘royalhouse’, ‘golden house’).There can be no doubt,however, that Tolkienattempted to correctinconsistency, no less thanoutright error, whenever itcame to his attention, and itwas our opinion, with theadvice and agreement of

Christopher Tolkien, that anattempt should be made to doso in the anniversary edition,in so far as we could carefullyand conservativelydistinguish what to emend.Many of the emendationsin the present text are tomarks of punctuation, eitherto correct recenttypographical errors or torepair surviving alterationsintroduced in the second

printing of The Fellowship ofthe Ring. In the latter respectand in every case, Tolkien’soriginal punctuation is alwaysmore felicitous – subtlepoints, when one iscomparing commas and semicolons, but no less a part ofthe author’s intendedexpression. Distinctive wordssuch as chill rather than cold,and glistered rather thanglistened, changed by

typesetters long ago withoutauthorization, likewise havebeen restored. A controlledamount of regularization alsoseemed called for, such asnaught rather than nought, achange instituted by Tolkienbut not carried through in allinstances; Dark Power ratherthan dark power when thereference is obviously toSauron (or Morgoth);Barrow-downs by Tolkien’s

preference rather thanBarrowdowns; likewise Breehill rather than Bree Hill;accented and more commonDrúadan rather thanDruadan; capitalized namesof seasons when used aspersonification or metaphor,according to Tolkien’spredominant practice and theinternal logic of the text; andElvish rather than elvish whenused as a separate adjective,

following a preferenceTolkien marked in his copy ofthe second edition of TheLord of the Rings. In addition,we have added a secondaccent to Númenórean(s), asTolkien often wrote the namein manuscript and as itappears in The Silmarillionand other posthumouspublications.The result, nonetheless,still includes many variations

in capitalization, punctuation,and other points of style. Notall of these are erroneous:they include words such asSun, Moon, Hobbit, and Man(or sun, moon, hobbit, man),which may change formaccording to meaning orapplication, in relation toadjacent adjectives, orwhether Tolkien intendedpersonification, poetry, oremphasis. His intent cannot

be divined with confidence inevery case. But it is possibleto discern Tolkien’spreferences in manyinstances, from statements hewrote in his check copies ofThe Lord of the Rings or froma close analysis of its text inmanuscript, typescript, proof,and print. Whenever there hasbeen any doubt whatsoever asto the author’s intentions, thetext has been allowed to

stand.Most of the demonstrableerrors noted by ChristopherTolkien in The History ofMiddle-earth also have beencorrected, such as thedistance from the BrandywineBridge to the Ferry ( tenmiles rather than twenty) andthe number of Merry’s ponies( five rather than six),shadows of earlier drafts. Butthose inconsistencies of

content, such as Gimli’sfamous (and erroneous)statement in Book III,Chapter 7, ‘Till now I havehewn naught but wood since Ileft Moria’, which wouldrequire rewriting to emendrather than simple correction,remain unchanged.So many new emendationsto The Lord of the Rings, andsuch an extensive review ofits text, deserve to be fully

documented. Although mostreaders will be content withthe text alone, many willwant to know more about theproblems encountered inpreparing this new edition,and their solutions (wheresolutions have been possible),especially where the text hasbeen emended, but also whereit has not. To this end, and toilluminate the work in otherrespects, we are preparing a

volume of annotations to TheLord of the Rings forpublication in 2005. This willallow us to discuss, at alength impossible in aprefatory note, the varioustextual cruces of The Lord ofthe Rings, to identify changesthat have been made to thepresent text, and to remark onsignificant alterations to thepublished work throughout itshistory. We will also explain

archaic or unusual words andnames in The Lord of theRings, explore literary andhistorical influences, noteconnections with Tolkien’sother writings, and commenton differences between itsdrafts and published form, onquestions of language, and onmuch else that we hope willinterest readers and enhancetheir enjoyment of Tolkien’smasterpiece.

Wayne G. Hammond &Christina ScullMay 2004

FOREWORD TOTHE SECONDEDITION

This tale grew in the telling,until it became a history ofthe Great War of the Ringand included many glimpsesof the yet more ancienthistory that preceded it. Itwas begun soon after TheHobbit was written andbefore its publication in 1937;but I did not go on with thissequel, for I wished first tocomplete and set in order themythology and legends of the

Elder Days, which had thenbeen taking shape for someyears. I desired to do this formy own satisfaction, and Ihad little hope that otherpeople would be interested inthis work, especially since itwas primarily linguistic ininspiration and was begun inorder to provide the necessarybackground of ‘history’ forElvish tongues.When those whose advice

and opinion I soughtcorrected little hope to nohope, I went back to thesequel, encouraged byrequests from readers formore information concerninghobbits and their adventures.But the story was drawnirresistibly towards the olderworld, and became anaccount, as it were, of its endand passing away before itsbeginning and middle had

been told. The process hadbegun in the writing of TheHobbit, in which there werealready some references tothe older matter: Elrond,Gondolin, the High-elves, andthe orcs, as well as

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is often erroneously. called a trilogy, when it is in fact a single novel, consisting of six books plus appendices, sometimes published in three volumes. The fir