The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion
The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion | |
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Author | Wayne G. Hammond, Christina Scull |
Publisher | HarperCollins (UK) Houghton Mifflin (US) |
Released | December 2005 |
Format | Hardcover; paperback |
Pages | 976 |
ISBN | 000720308X |
The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion is a scholarly book by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. It is an annotated reference to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
The Reader's Companion was designed to accompany the revised one-volume 50th anniversary edition of The Lord of the Rings. It is available in both hardcover and paperback.
Table of content
- Preface
- A Brief History of The Lord of the Rings
- (The development and publication history of the book)
- Chronologies, Calendars, and Moons
- (Time scheme used by Tolkien, utilising lunar calendar)
- Preliminaries
- (Dust-jacket design (1954-55 edition) and Title-page design of The Lord of the Rings)
- The Maps of The Lord of the Rings
- (Details on the maps appearing in most editions)
- Foreword to the Second Edition
- (Notes to Tolkien's Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, 1956)
- The Reader's Companion
- Prologue
- The Fellowship of the Ring
- The Two Towers
- The Return of the King
- Appendices
- Extracts from a Letter by J.R.R. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, ?Late 1951
- (Tolkien giving an account of the structure of the whole book)
- Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
- (Notes by Tolkien explaining the ways in which the names should be translated)
- Changes to the Editions of 2004-5
- (Text changes made during the 2004 and 2005 edition of The Lord of the Rings)
- Index
Contents
Hammond and Scull proceed chapter-by-chapter from the original foreword through to the end of The Lord of the Rings. Appendices, examining the evolution of the text, changes, inconsistencies, and errors, often using comments from Tolkien's own notes and letters. Other sections cover the numerous maps of Middle-earth, chronologies of the story and its writing, and notes on the book and jacket design of the first editions of 1954–1955.
- Rare or previously unpublished content
- A newly transcribed version of Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings. Another version of this was published as "Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings" in A Tolkien Compass (1975).
- Two versions of a formerly unpublished index of poems, characters, places and names or things in The Lord of the Rings: "Index questions" and The Lord of the Rings Index. Notes regarding characters and etymologies have been preserved.
- The missing part of Tolkien's 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, regarding the events of The Lord of the Rings, previously unpublished. The other parts have been published as Letter 131.
- The complete Scheme used by Tolkien to summarise the events of the entire book, including new contents and notes.
- Several early versions, drafts and schemes of The Lord of the Rings, most of them unpublished in The History of The Lord of the Rings.
- A reproduction of a manuscript page showing a synoptic time scheme used while writing The Lord of the Rings. It summarizes the movements of characters between the 8th and the 12th of March and several events up to the 20th.
- Formerly unpublished parts of "The Hunt for the Ring", in particular The Hunt for the Ring: Time Scheme - Black Riders and other missing manuscripts, schemes or drafts.
- Notes on significant changes made by the author and by Christopher Tolkien after his father's death
- Notes on significant changes of dates and events during the writing of The Lord of the Rings, or in different editions
- Brief references to illustrations, maps, and earlier versions of the text
- References to people, places, and events that appear in other books by Tolkien
- Explanations of archaic and unusual words
- Translations and primers on how to use Tolkien's invented languages
Cover art
The art on the cover of this book was drawn by Tolkien in 1954 for an experimental dust-jacket for The Fellowship of the Ring. It shows a ribbon running behind the central Ring of Sauron, around which is written in Tengwar the Ring inscription in the Black Speech. The runic letters on the ribbon read, from the Ring Verse, 'In the land of shadows where the Mordor lie', shadows and Mordor inverted in error. Above this, in symbolic opposition to the One Ring, is Narya, the Ring of Fire worn by Gandalf. The complete design of the experimental dust-jacket is reproduced in J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator, fig. 176.
Reception
The book won the 2006 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies.
David Bratman, reviewing the work for Tolkien Studies, described it as "simply ... an Annotated Lord of the Rings that for reasons of space omits the text of the work being discussed", by contrast with Douglas A. Anderson's The Annotated Hobbit. He notes that the omission makes keying the notes to the text difficult: page numbers are given for the three-volume Allen and Unwin 1954-1955 edition, and the HarperCollins/Houghton Mifflin one-volume 2004 edition. Since many readers have neither of those, it also provides the first words of every cited paragraph, which in his view is at least workable. As an annotated edition, it succeeds "admirably", Bratman writes, in documenting many words and phrases "worthy of specific relevant commentary", and in providing a scholar capable of doing such a task justice. He notes that at 900 pages "of small type" it is similar in length to the text, while the comments range from brief glosses to "a five-page essay" on the Elf-lady Galadriel, which he calls "by itself a major essay on the subject".[1]
Publication history and gallery
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- First Edition
- HarperCollins hardcover (2005), pp. 976. ISBN 000720308X
- HarperCollins paperback (2005), ISBN 000720907X
- First Revised Edition
- HarperCollins paperback (2008), ISBN 0007270607
- Second Revised Edition
- HarperCollins hardcover (2014), ISBN 000755690X
See also
External links
- Addenda and Corrigenda to The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion (2005)
- Addenda and Corrigenda to The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion (first revised edition 2008)
- Addenda and Corrigenda to The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion (second revised edition 2014)
- David Bratman, Review of the book, Tolkien Studies. 3
References
- ↑ "The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion (review)" (accessed 31 May 2022)