Constructing The Lord of the Rings

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  In December 1937, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote the first five pages of The Lord of the Rings. He called the chapter "A Long-expected Party" and offered it to his publisher for a twelve-year-old to read. That twelve-year-old, Rayner Unwin, had already recommended The Hobbit for publication. Neither he nor Tolkien yet knew where the new story would go. The critic Nick Groom observed that Tolkien had "little sense of plot or character, direction or development" to guide him. The process would take more than ten years and produce 9,250 pages of manuscript. Tolkien invented most of the story's central elements as he went. What kept him returning to the story through a world war and years of silence? And what happened to the ending he wrote but never published?

  34

• 2. A Shapeless Beginning

  ›

  By the 4th of March 1938, Tolkien had drafted three chapters and described them in a letter to his publisher. He noted that the story had "taken an unpremeditated turn." Christopher Tolkien identifies this as the moment Black Riders entered the tale. Yet the significance of the Ring, and even the title The Lord of the Rings, did not come until the second quarter of 1938.

  The central protagonist at this early stage was not Frodo but a hobbit named Bingo. He was described as Bilbo's nephew; the names had been borrowed from Tolkien's 1934 poem "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil." Also in the cast were characters named Frodo, Odo, Vigo, and Marmaduke. Christopher Tolkien noted that his father "took delight in the names and relations of the hobbit-families." He added that "in no respect did he chop and change more copiously." The story's eventual cast of characters was nowhere in sight.

  Tom Shippey, reading the early drafts assembled in The Return of the Shadow, found their formlessness startling. He concluded that Tolkien had begun with almost no plan and no conception of the story's destination. Tolkien held a full-time academic position and marked exams for extra income, which made sustained progress difficult. The story kept expanding in complexity faster than Tolkien could answer its own questions.

  In August 1939, Tolkien wrote an outline of the novel from Rivendell to the destruction of the Ring. The outline omitted Isengard, Lothlórien, Rohan, and all three major battles of the finished text.

  36

• 3. Years of Interruption

  ›

  In his foreword to the second edition, Tolkien recalled writing "mostly by night" in 1940, despite the war. He stopped when he reached Balin's tomb in Moria. He then paused for nearly a year. When he resumed, he described arriving at Lothlórien and the Great River "late in 1941." In 1942, Tolkien made his first drafts of what would become "Minas Tirith" and "The Muster of Rohan" in Book 5. Then he broke off again. He later wrote: "there as the beacons flared in Anórien and Théoden came to Harrowdale I stopped." He added: "Foresight had failed and there was no time for thought."

  Tolkien abandoned the novel for most of 1943 before restarting in April 1944. The reason was his son Christopher, then serving in South Africa with the Royal Air Force. Tolkien began sending Christopher chapters as each was completed, writing the novel as a serial for a distant reader. The connection to a specific audience gave the work renewed momentum.

  Tolkien made another major effort in 1946 and showed the manuscript to his publishers in 1947. The story was effectively finished the following year, though he did not complete the revision of earlier parts of the work until 1949. Throughout that decade, Tolkien drew constant support from the Inklings, and especially from C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Tolkien would later explain the role of practical work in a letter to the novelist Naomi Mitchison.

  4511

• 4. Maps, Names, Languages

  ›

  In that letter, Tolkien laid out his method: "I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit." Writing without a map first, he added, "lands one in confusions and impossibilities." His working maps changed continuously as the story developed. By 1943, Christopher Tolkien had redrawn his father's "First Map" as "a large elaborate map in pencil and coloured chalks."

  Christopher Tolkien noted that hobbit names were "very fluid" throughout the process, and his father "chop and changed" them more than anything else. Among those that appeared and vanished were Angelica Baggins, Caramella Bolger, and Semolina Baggins. The chapter later known as "Strider" introduced a figure whose name would prove especially stubborn. Gandalf's letter in that chapter described the future Aragorn as "a ranger (wild hobbit) known as Trotter," wearing wooden shoes that clatter. Tom Shippey writes that Tolkien "stuck determinedly to the increasingly inapposite name Trotter" even after the character became the tall, long-legged Aragorn. The speech where Aragorn defends "Strider" as the title of his royal house of Telcontar survived directly from that earlier, awkward struggle.

  Tolkien described his Middle-earth writings in a letter as "largely an essay in linguistic aesthetic." He was a professional philologist, and both invented and real languages fed into the narrative. Tolkien had Gildor's Elves sing in untranslated Quenya in the woods of the Shire, trusting the sound alone to work on the listener. Gandalf chanted the Ring Verse in the Black Speech, creating a dramatically terrifying effect on his listeners. Shippey notes that Tolkien believed "untranslated elvish would do a job that English could not."

  The tower of Orthanc changed fundamentally in Tolkien's drawings: in the earliest version, it rose in multiple round tiers with three small horns on top. In a later version, it stood on a cloven hill, with a round arch supporting the weight of the tower. In the final drawing, it became four tall, nearly pyramidal horns of natural rock, rising from level ground. Text and drawing were updated together until, in both, Tolkien felt the description was correct. Gollum's peculiar manner of speech, which Gergely Nagy identifies as his most distinctive quality, was not yet close to its final form.

  116

• 5. Getting Into a Fix

  ›

  Tolkien drafted the orcs' capture of Frodo in 1944. His letter described the predicament: "such a fix that not even an author will be able to extricate him without labour and difficulty." He did not work out Frodo's escape until 1947. The passage of the marshes in Book 4 required multiple versions and, Tolkien admitted, produced "a few pages for a lot of sweat."

  Gollum had initially spoken "much more coherently and logically," according to Gergely Nagy, "so that the contrast was much less striking between his two schizophrenic selves." Tolkien elaborated his character through extensive rewriting, describing the result as "a sort of good Sméagol angry with a bad Gollum." Nagy notes that Gollum's peculiar idiom was achieved only through that labour.

  Giant spiders, like those in The Hobbit, were Tolkien's first consideration for the threat facing Frodo and Sam near Mordor. He also considered Ungoliant; Nick Groom describes her as "Morgoth's fearsome ally" from The Silmarillion and "considerably more powerful than a Balrog." Tolkien settled on Shelob instead.

  Tolkien was dissatisfied with much of Book 3, including the battle of Helm's Deep and Saruman's dialogue at Orthanc. He rewrote them substantially and spent around a year deciding what to do with the Palantír. In 1946, he reworked Book 5. He wrote Éowyn as fatally injured when she kills the Witch-King, and sent Gondor's army into Mordor itself. A new fluency entered the drafting process as the story approached its end.

  876

• 6. When Writing Came Freely

  ›

  Tolkien noted in a draft that the Treebeard chapter "was written off more or less as it stands." Christopher Tolkien described it as seeming "to write itself." Chapter 6:2, "The Land of Shadow," was drafted "swiftly and in a single burst of writing." Chapter 6:3, "Mount Doom," was drafted in the same manuscript, directly and without any preceding rough sketches.

  Christopher Tolkien credited his father's "long thought" about the Ring's destruction with allowing "Mount Doom" to be written "more quickly and surely than almost any earlier chapter." The chapters that followed, "The Field of Cormallen" and "The Steward and the King," similarly reached near-final form in a single stage. Chapter 6:6, "Many Partings," was drafted in "remarkably brief and spare" form and later extended with new material. Christopher Tolkien described the fair copy of this run of chapters as appearing in "my father's most handsome script."

  Chapter 6:7, "Homeward Bound," was drafted rapidly "in one long burst," along with part of "The Scouring of the Shire." Chapter 6:9, "The Grey Havens," followed in the same long manuscript, and that text survived largely unchanged, with a few additions: mentions of Fredegar Bolger, Frodo's first illness, and the fine clothing Merry and Pippin wore. After "The Grey Havens," Tolkien's drafts contained one more section: a full epilogue that was cut before publication.

  1017

• 7. The Lost Ending

  ›

  Tolkien initially drafted an epilogue about Sam Gamgee, Rosie Cotton, and their family. It would have been accompanied by a facsimile of a letter from King Aragorn, written in both English and Sindarin and set out in the Tengwar script.

  The first draft of the epilogue closed with these words: "They went in, and Sam shut the door. But even as he did so, he heard suddenly, deep and unstilled, the sigh and murmur of the Sea upon the shores of middle-earth." Tolkien had not finished even then. The appendices that filled the third volume, published in October 1955, were written after the rest of the novel was complete.

  1017