The Fellowship of the Ring Read Free Page A

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 Welis, 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’,