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.
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- Rare or previously unpublished content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- Two versions of a formerly unpublished index of poems, characters, places and names or things in The Lord of the Rings: "Index questions" and The Lord of the Rings Index.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The missing part of Tolkien's 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, regarding the events of The Lord of the Rings, previously unpublished.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- Several early versions, drafts and schemes of The Lord of the Rings, most of them unpublished in The History of The Lord of the Rings.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- Formerly unpublished parts of "The Hunt for the Ring", in particular The Hunt for the Ring: Time Scheme - Black Riders and other missing manuscripts, schemes or drafts.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
Reception
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
| First edition hardcover boxed set
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| First edition paperback boxed set
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| Second revised edition boxed set
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- First Edition
- First Revised Edition
- Second Revised Edition
See also
The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide
External links
References
