The Lord of the Rings Foreword

The Foreword is the very first section appearing in The Lord of the Rings.

The Foreword notoriously introduces minor spoilers that concern much later events in the story, as if they are well-known facts. For example, the first edition Forword mentioned the descendants of Master Samwise Gamgee, thus reassuring that he would survive the adventure.

First edition

In the Foreword to the first edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien imposes himself as merely translator and editor of the text to come, thus sharing the in-universe character of the 1951 prefatory note to the second edition of The Hobbit.

Tolkien disliked his own text, noting that it mixes real-life matters of his life (including referencing the Inklings and his children) with the in-universe "machinery" of the Tale.

Second and later editions

In 1965 Ballantine Books needed a new text in order to renew the copyright in the United States, and to challenge the controversy raised by Ace Books. For that edition Tolkien wrote a new Foreword.^{:p. lxx}

Mistakes

Recollecting the writing of the book 25 years earlier, Tolkien claims that he began writing The Lord of the Rings soon after completing The Hobbit; and when The Silmarillion was rejected, he "went back to the sequel". In reality it was right then when he started writing the book.^{:pp. lxxi-lxxii}

In the same text, he claims the he had a hiatus in 1940, after writing about Balin's Tomb, until late 1941. Christopher Tolkien says that this detail contradicts contemporary Letter 37 and was probably a false memory of that year; the hiatus was probably in 1939 until August 1940.^{:p. xxiii}

See also

• The Hobbit Preface