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In the United States, the text of the Ballantine paperback has remained unchanged since Tolkien added his few revisions in 1966. The text in all the Houghton Mifflin editions remained unchanged from 1967 until 1987, when Houghton Mifflin photo-offset the then current three-volume British hardcover edition in order to update the text used in their editions. In those new reprintings a number of further corrections (overseen by Christopher Tolkien) were added, and the errant Ballantine branch of revision (including the ‘Estella Bolger’ addition) was integrated into the main branch of textual descent. Beginning in 1987, the Houghton Mifflin editions also included an earlier version of this ‘Note on the Text’ which contains some slight errors and simplifications based upon what I then understood to be true. The revision of the ‘Note on the Text’, undertaken for a new reset edition of The Lord of the Rings (to be published in various formats), replaces and supersedes the earlier version.

This new edition also contains a number of new corrections (again supervised by Christopher Tolkien), as well as a reconfigured index of names and page references. For this ‘best possible’ version, the text of The Lord of the Rings is being entered into computers, which should allow for a greater uniformity of text in future editions. Rayner Unwin, for much of his life Tolkien’s publisher, has reminisced that as a child he was told, as an incentive to improve his religious knowledge, ‘that the University Presses would pay five pounds to anyone who detected a printer’s error in one of their authorized Bibles. I never heard of anyone who earned this small fortune, but I have often imagined an equivalent reward being offered three centuries after the first publication of The Lord of the Rings. It would take at least that long to achieve typographical perfection.

It may indeed, but this new edition makes a significant stride towards such perfection, as well as achieving a desirable conformity of the text in the various formats in which it is published.

The textual history of The Lord of the Rings, merely in its published form, is a vast and complex web. In this brief note I have given only a glimpse of the overall sequence and structure. Further details on the revisions and corrections made over the years to the published text of The Lord of the Rings, and a fuller account of its publishing history, may be found in J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography, by Wayne G. Hammond, with the assistance of Douglas A. Anderson (1993).

For those interested on observing the gradual evolving of The Lord of the Rings from its earliest drafts to its published form, I highly recommend Christopher Tolkien’s account in volumes six to nine of his series The History of Middle-earth: The Return of the Shadow (1988); The Treason of Isengard (1989); The War of the Ring (1990); and Sauron Defeated (1992). These volumes contain an engrossing over-the-shoulder look at the growth and unfolding of a masterpiece-in-progress, unparalleled in literature.

Last, I must acknowledge with great pleasure the friendly assistance and cooperation over many years of Christopher Tolkien and Wayne G. Hammond.

Douglas A. Anderson
Ithaca, New York
April 1993

The Lord of the Rings: Note on the Text – Part 1
The Lord of the Rings: Note on the Text – Part 2
The Lord of the Rings: Note on the Text – Part 3

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Posted: September 28th, 2008
Author: Lee