The Fellowship of the Ring Read Free

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 laidout 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