The Lord of the Rings

highest textual integrity.
    In the United States, the text of the Ballantine paperback has remained unchanged for more than three decades after Tolkien added his few revisions in 1966. The text in all of the Houghton Mifflin editions remained unchanged from 1967 until 1987, when Houghton Mifflin photo-offset the then current three-volume British hardcover edition in order to update the text used in their editions. In those new reprintings a number of further corrections (overseen by Christopher Tolkien) were added, and the errant Ballantine branch of revision (including the ‘Estella Bolger’ addition) was integrated into the main branch of textual descent. This method of correction involved a cut-and-paste process with printed versions of the text. Beginning with the 1987 Houghton Mifflin edition, an earlier version of this ‘Note on the Text’ (dated October 1986) was added to
The Lord of the Rings.
This ‘Note’ has been reworked three times since then - the version dated April 1993 first appeared in 1994, and the version dated April 2002 came out later that year. The present ‘Note’ replaces and supersedes all previous versions.
    For the 1994 British edition published by HarperCollins, the text of
The Lord of the Rings
was entered into word-processing files. This next stage of textual evolution came about to allow for a greater uniformity of the text in all future editions, but with it, inevitably, came new wrinkles. Some new misreadings entered into the text, while at the same time others were fixed. In the worst instance, one line of the ring inscription in the chapter ‘The Shadow of the Past’ of
The Fellowship of the Ring
was simply dropped. Unforeseeable glitches arose in other editions when the base computerized text was transferred into page-making or typesetting programs - e.g., in one edition of
The Fellowship of the Ring,
the closing two sentences of ‘The Council of Elrond’ simply and inexplicably disappeared. Such glitches have been very much the exception, not the rule, and the text has otherwise maintained a consistency and integrity throughout its computerized evolution.
    The 1994 edition also contained a number of new corrections (again supervised by Christopher Tolkien), as well as a reconfigured index of names and page references. The 1994 text was first used in American editions published by Houghton Mifflin in 1999. A small number of further corrections were added into the 2002 three-volume edition illustrated by Alan Lee, published by HarperCollins in Great Britain and Houghton Mifflin in the United States.
    The textual history of
The Lord of the Rings,
merely in its published form, is a vast and complex web. In this brief note I have given only a glimpse of the overall sequence and structure. Further details on the revisions and corrections made over the years to the published text of
The Lord of the Rings,
and a fuller account of its publishing history, may be found in
J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography,
by Wayne G. Hammond, with the assistance of Douglas A. Anderson (1993).
    For those interested in observing the gradual evolving of
The Lord of the Rings
from its earliest drafts to its published form, I highly recommend Christopher Tolkien’s account, which appears within five volumes of his twelve-volume series
The History of Middle-earth.
Volumes six through nine contain the major part of his study pertaining to
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the Shadow
(1988);
The Treason of Isengard
(1989);
The War of the Ring
(1990); and
Sauron Defeated
(1992). Also, the final book of the series,
The Peoples of Middle-earth
(1996), covers the evolution of the prologue and appendices to
The Lord of the Rings.
These volumes contain an engrossing over-the-shoulder account of the growth and writing of Tolkien’s masterpiece.
    The process of studying Tolkien’s manuscripts of
The Lord of the Rings
involved the deciphering of versions where Tolkien wrote first in pencil and then in ink atop the pencilled draft. Christopher Tolkien has decribed his father’s method of composition in
The Return of the Shadow:
‘In the handwriting that he used for rapid drafts and sketches, not intended to endure long before he turned to them again and gave them a more workable form, letters are so loosely formed that a word which cannot be deduced or guessed at from the context or from later versions can prove perfectly opaque after long examination; and if, as he often did, he used a soft