The History of The Lord of the Rings

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The History of The Lord of the Rings opens with a Hobbit who never quite existed named Bingo. Long before Frodo Baggins set out from the Shire, that was the name written at the top of J. R. R. Tolkien's drafts. Christopher Tolkien spent years sifting through those drafts, and what he found was not a story born whole but one pieced together through false starts, deleted characters, and what one scholar described as a spider's web of argumentation. The four volumes he assembled between 1988 and 1992 form a rare thing: a documented record of how one of the most intricate fictional worlds ever built actually came to be. How did a single Hobbit's name change so many times before settling? Why did Tolkien reach Rivendell without knowing what came next? And what was the ceremony at the end of the story that eventually got cut? Those questions run through every chapter of this series.

• 2. Building the Series

  ›

  Christopher Tolkien originally planned to release the work in three volumes, not four. When the second volume, The Treason of Isengard, first appeared in paperback, a note indicated that the third volume would be called Sauron Defeated and would close out the series. That plan changed. A fourth volume was added, and the complete set was also numbered as volumes six through nine of the broader twelve-volume series known as The History of Middle-earth. Each volume carries a Tengwar inscription on its title page, written by Christopher Tolkien himself in the alphabet his father devised for the High-Elves. That inscription for the first volume traces the journey of a Hobbit identified as "at first named Bingo but afterwards Frodo," from Hobbiton through the Old Forest to Weathertop and Rivendell, ending before the Tomb of Balin.

• 3. Titles With a Past

  ›

  The Return of the Shadow, The Treason of Isengard, The War of the Ring, Sauron Defeated: none of these titles are inventions for the documentary series. They are names J. R. R. Tolkien once proposed for the individual books within The Lord of the Rings itself. Tolkien conceived the novel as a single volume organized into six books plus extensive appendices. His publisher split it into three physical volumes. The titles Tolkien had drafted for those six internal books included The Ring Sets Out, The Ring Goes South, The Journey of the Ring-Bearers, and The End of the Third Age. When a seven-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings was later published, three of the documentary volume titles were adopted for three of the books: The Treason of Isengard for Book 3, The War of the Ring for Book 5, and The End of the Third Age for Book 6. The Return of the Shadow had been a discarded title for the first volume of the novel.

• 4. A Hobbit Named Odo

  ›

  The character eventually settled on as Pippin Took passed through an extraordinary sequence of names during Tolkien's drafting process. At various points the character was called Odo, Frodo, Folco, Faramond, Peregrin, Hamilcar, Fredegar, and Olo. The figures behind the name shifted across Hobbit families too: they were variously Boffins, Bolgers, and Tooks. This pattern of rewriting illustrates what Christopher Tolkien observed about his father's method: that Tolkien had brought the story as far as Rivendell still without any clear conception of what lay before him. Tom Shippey characterized the tendency as getting bogged down in sometimes strikingly unnecessary webs of minor causation. The first volume, The Return of the Shadow, covers three early phases of composition, including what Tolkien himself later called the crucial chapter, the one that establishes the central plot: "The Shadow of the Past."

• 5. Fluency at Last

  ›

  The breakthrough chapter, according to Christopher Tolkien's record, was "The Breaking of the Fellowship." Before that point the writing had come hard; after it, chapters were suddenly achieved with far greater facility than any previous part of the story. The shift changed the nature of Tolkien's problem. Where he had once struggled to find the path forward, he now faced the challenge of choosing between competing versions of scenes. Sauron Defeated, the fourth volume, contains a "fascinating study" of this later phase, and Christopher Tolkien identified two episodes from that phase that were ultimately cut: the pardoning of Saruman, and an awards ceremony that would have closed the book. The volume also contains a rejected epilogue in which Sam answers his children's questions about the events of the story.

• 6. What Else Sauron Defeated Holds

  ›

  Beyond the story of the Ring itself, the fourth volume includes material that reaches further into Tolkien's invented world. The Notion Club Papers, a time-travel story connected to the island of Numenor, appears here. So does a draft called the Drowning of Anadune, which eventually led to the Akallabeth, the account of Numenor's fall. The volume also preserves the only surviving account of Adunaic, the constructed language Tolkien built for the people of Numenor. The second volume, The Treason of Isengard, had already shown how wide Tolkien's invention ranged during the composition of a single stretch of narrative: it tracks the creation of Treebeard, the Ents, and Fangorn; the invention and development of Lothlórien and Galadriel; and the evolution of the Cirth script in an appendix. A discussion of the original map of Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age also appears there. Additional material on the appendices and a quickly abandoned sequel to the novel can be found in HoME 12, The Peoples of Middle-earth.