The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion

The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion
Author	Wayne G. Hammond, Christina Scull
Illustrator	J.R.R. Tolkien (cover)
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 published in 2005, 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.

The book contains many hard-to-find or previously unpublished material by Tolkien, among them is a significant text "Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings", (previously known as "Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings", first published in A Tolkien Compass) in which Tolkien explained the source or meaning of many of the names in the book, with a view to aiding translators in rendering his work into foreign languages.

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.

• Preface
• A Brief History of The Lord of the Rings
  (the development and publication history of the book)
• Chronologies, Calendars, and Moons
  (the time-scheme used by Tolkien to keep track of events)
• Preliminaries
  (the title-page and dust-jacket design of the first edition The Lord of the Rings)
• The Maps of The Lord of the Rings
  (details on the maps)
• Foreword to the Second Edition
  (notes to Tolkien's Foreword to the second edition The Lord of the Rings)

• 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 book)
• Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
  (Tolkien's notes explaining how the names in the book should be translated)
• Changes to the Editions of 2004-5
  (textual changes made in the 50th anniversary edition The Lord of the Rings)
• Index

Rare or new writings

• A newly transcribed version of "Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings". A less complete version of it 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 LotR: "Index questions" and "The Lord of the Rings Index". Notes regarding characters and etymologies have been preserved.
• The unpublished part of Tolkien’s 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, regarding the events of LotR. The other part, regarding The Silmarillion, has been published as Letter 131.
• The scheme used by Tolkien to summarise the events of the entire book, including new contents and notes.
• Several early versions, drafts, and schemes of LotR, most of them unpublished in The History of Middle-earth.
  • A reproduction of the 9th out of the 14 manuscripts on the time-scheme used while writing LotR. The full manuscripts have been printed in The Art of the Manuscript, and a transcript with notes and commentary in The Chronology of The Lord of the Rings.
• 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.

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.

See also Original dust-jacket designs

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".

Publication history and gallery

2005 first edition hardcover   2005 first edition paperback   2008 first revised edition   2014 second revised edition

• 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

• The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide

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