The Lord of the Rings

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 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 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