The Lord of the Rings Read Free Page A

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 BanksMebane 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 Kfir, 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 hisfather’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’, ‘golden house’). There can be no doubt, however, that Tolkien attempted to correct inconsistency, no less than outright error, whenever it came to his attention, and it was our opinion, with the advice and agreement of Christopher Tolkien, that an attempt should be made to do so in the anniversary edition, in so far as we