Red Book of Westmarch

• 1. Introduction

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  The Red Book of Westmarch never existed, yet J. R. R. Tolkien wrote about it as though it did. In The Lord of the Rings, the hobbit Bilbo Baggins tells the wizard Gandalf how he wants his own story to end. Bilbo says his ending would be him living, in his own words, "happily ever after to the end of his days." That line is lifted and reworked from the final chapter of The Hobbit, where a narrator had said something close to it about him. Tolkien built a whole fictional history around moments like this one, presenting himself as a translator rather than an inventor. He claimed that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were really hobbit-written accounts. These, he said, were later gathered into a single collection, the Red Book of Westmarch. Who actually filled its pages? How did one hobbit's diary grow into a multi-volume archive of translated Elvish lore and family records? And why would Tolkien reach for the name of a real medieval Welsh manuscript to make his invented history feel authentic? Those questions carry the story from Bilbo's quiet study in the Shire outward into centuries of scholarship.

• 2. A Hobbit's Holiday

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  Bilbo Baggins considers calling his memoir There and Back Again, A Hobbit's Holiday, according to Tolkien's account in The Hobbit. Tolkien gives the novel itself a matching subtitle, The Hobbit or There and Back Again. That subtitle ties Bilbo's private working title to the book readers actually hold. In The Lord of the Rings, this same project is described as written inside Bilbo's own red leather-bound diary. That diary is the object that starts the whole chain of documents traced here.

  Bilbo's diary is still unfinished when he grows old and leaves the Shire behind. Finishing the work falls to somebody else entirely.

• 3. The Downfall of the Lord of the Rings

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  Bilbo expands his memoir into a full record of the War of the Ring, folding in the exploits of his kinsman Frodo Baggins and others. He leaves the unfinished manuscript for Frodo to complete and organize. Frodo writes most of the final text, drawing on Bilbo's diary and, in Tolkien's phrase, "many pages of loose notes." When Tolkien's main narrative ends, the work is almost finished, and Frodo passes the remaining task to his gardener, Samwise Gamgee.

  In the last chapter of The Return of the King, Tolkien even supplies a mock title page for the whole project. It lists a string of rejected titles before settling on Frodo's final choice: "My Diary. My Unexpected Journey. There and Back Again. And What Happened After. Adventures of Five Hobbits. The Tale of the Great Ring, compiled by Bilbo Baggins from his own observations and the accounts of his friends. What we did in the War of the Ring."

  Bilbo, meanwhile, had already finished a separate project of his own: three more volumes bound in the same red leather.

• 4. Translations from the Elvish

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  Long before Frodo takes up the pen, Bilbo spends years in Rivendell translating Elvish lore from the Elder Days. He titles the result Translations from the Elvish, by B.B., a work spanning three volumes bound in red leather like his diary. After the defeat of Sauron, Bilbo hands these three volumes to Frodo. Tolkien says the resulting set of four books was "probably" kept together in a single red case.

  That red case would travel on to people neither Bilbo nor Frodo had ever met.

• 5. Custody of the Red Book

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  Sam, later mayor of the Shire, becomes the next keeper of the four red volumes after Frodo departs. In time, custody passes to Sam's eldest daughter, Elanor Fairbairn, and then to her descendants. They become known as the Fairbairns of the Towers or the Wardens of Westmarch. At some unrecorded point, unnamed hands in Westmarch add a fifth volume of hobbit genealogical tables and commentary. Tolkien calls this five-volume set, taken together, the Red Book of Westmarch, the title under which it survives.

  The original Red Book itself, Tolkien states, was never preserved. Only copies survive, each carrying its own added notes. King Elessar of Arnor and Gondor commissions the first of these copies. Thain Peregrin the First, once one of Frodo's traveling companions, carries it to Gondor, where it becomes known as the Thain's Book. This version, Tolkien writes, "contained much that was later omitted or lost," and it gains heavy annotation in Gondor concerning Elvish languages especially. Faramir's grandson, Barahir, adds a short version of the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen to this same copy.

  Peregrin's great-grandson probably requests a further copy, revised and expanded, to be sent back to the Shire. The scribe Findegil writes out this version, and it is stored at the Took family seat, Great Smials. Tolkien notes that this copy alone contains the entirety of Bilbo's Translations from the Elvish. Surviving somehow into Tolkien's own era, it becomes the very text he translates out of its original languages. He renders Rohirric into Old English, among other choices.

  One other supposedly ancient hobbit record, kept elsewhere in the Shire, fed directly into these same pages.

• 6. Other Hobbit Records

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  The Took family of Tuckborough keeps its own set of annals, the fictional Yearbook of Tuckborough. Tolkien describes it as the oldest known book in the Shire, most likely kept, like the Thain's Book copy before it, at the Great Smials. Its chronicle reportedly opens with the founding of the Shire in the year T.A. 1601. That is well over a thousand years before the events of The Lord of the Rings, which begin in T.A. 3001. Inside its pages are records of births, deaths, marriages, and land sales among the Tooks. Much of this information later feeds into the Red Book of Westmarch.

  Tolkien gives the Yearbook two further names, the Great Writ of Tuckborough and the Yellowskin. The second name hints that the book was bound in yellow rather than red leather. He also references other supposedly historical hobbit documents. These include the Tale of Years, part of which supplies the timeline used in The Lord of the Rings, and the Herblore of the Shire. This second text is credited to Frodo's contemporary Meriadoc Brandybuck as a source on pipe-weed. It is unclear whether either work was folded into any actual edition.

  Whether Tolkien's own scholarly framing holds together is a question later academics could not resist testing.

• 7. A Scholarly Disguise

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  Tolkien draws a direct line in his own commentary between Red Book contents and his published books. Bilbo's journey corresponds to The Hobbit, and Frodo's journey to The Lord of the Rings. Background material maps onto the Appendices, essays such as those in Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle-earth. Hobbit poetry scattered through the margins of the story becomes The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, while Bilbo's translated Elven histories and legends become The Silmarillion. Tolkien scholar Vladimir Brljak cautions against reading this too literally. In Brljak's view, readers are probably not meant to imagine the published books as direct translations from the fictitious Red Book. Instead, they are Tolkien's own scholarly and literary adaptations of that supposed source.

  Some details concerning Gollum and the magic ring in the first edition of The Hobbit were rewritten for The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit itself was later revised to match. Tolkien explains the discrepancy inside the fiction itself. Bilbo lied in his first account, under the influence of the ring, now recast as the sinister One Ring.

  Tolkien scholar Mark T. Hooker traces the Red Book's name to a real Welsh collection of history and poetry, the 15th century Red Book of Hergest. That work includes the Mabinogion. Hooker draws a direct parallel between the two authors. Lady Charlotte Guest presented herself as translating medieval Welsh stories from manuscript into a mythology for Wales. Tolkien, in the same way, presents himself as translating hobbit manuscripts from Westron into a mythology for England. The found-manuscript device itself is older still. Tolkien follows a tradition in English literature established by Samuel Richardson in the 18th century. Richardson's novels include Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, published in 1740, and Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady, published in 1747-48. Tolkien used the same found-manuscript device again in his incomplete time travel novel, The Notion Club Papers.

  Scholar Gergely Nagy argues that Tolkien wanted his legendarium to read as a genuine-seeming collection of tales and myths within its own fictional frame. To achieve this, Tolkien revised The Lord of the Rings to ascribe its documents to Bilbo. The documents were supposedly written during Bilbo's years in Rivendell and preserved in the Red Book. The title There and Back Again, in this reading, captures an archetypal hobbit outlook on adventure. Tolkien scholar Richard C. West compares Frodo's longing for the journey "there and back again" to the Greek concept of nostos, meaning a heroic return. West describes Tolkien's Red Book as a pastiche of scholarship, a spurious source. Its authority, he writes, comes not from age but from the modern mystique of scholarly research.

  That borrowed mystique would soon travel out of print and onto film.

• 8. Adaptations

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  In Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring, There and Back Again supplies the basis for the voiceover in the "Concerning Hobbits" scene. That sequence is greatly extended in the Special Extended Edition. Bilbo's writing of the book becomes his stated motive for wanting privacy in the film, replacing a more complicated situation from the novel. Bilbo only speaks his line about a "happy ending" after he gives up the One Ring. The exchange is tweaked to mark Bilbo's release from the ring's weight, freeing him to choose how his own story ends.

  In Jackson's film, the book Bilbo hands to Frodo carries the subtitle A Hobbit's Tale rather than A Hobbit's Holiday. The Red Book appears in full, not just as a title page. It appears at the end of the film The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. In 1974, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published a one-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings, bound in red imitation leather. It is the closest anything in the real world has come to holding the Red Book itself.