FOREWORD. As is well known, the manuscripts and typescripts of The Lord of the Rings were sold by J. R. R. Tolkien to Marquette University, Milwaukee, a few years after its publication, together with those of The Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham, and also Mr. Bliss. A long time elapsed between the shipment of these latter papers, which reached Marquette in July 1957, and that of The Lord of the Rings, which did not arrive until the following year. The reason for this was that my father had undertaken to sort, annotate, and date the multifarious manuscripts of The Lord of the Rings, but found it impossible at that time to do the work required. It is clear that he never did so, and in the end let the papers go just as they were; it was noted when they reached Marquette that they were 'in no order'. Had he done so, he must have seen at that time that, very large though the manuscript collection was, it was nonetheless incomplete. Seven years later, in 1965, when he was working on the revision of The Lord of the Rings, he wrote to the Director of Libraries at Marquette, asking if a certain scheme of dates and events in the narrative was to be found there, since he had 'never made out any full schedule or note of the papers transferred to you.' In this letter he explained that the transfer had taken place at a time when his papers were dispersed between his house in Headington (Oxford) and his rooms in Merton College; and he also said that he now found himself still in possession of 'written matter' that 'should belong to you'. when he had finished the revision of The Lord of the Rings he would look into the question. But he did not do so. These papers passed to me on his death eight years later; but though Humphrey Carpenter made reference to them in his Biography (1977) and cited from them some early notes, I neglec- ted them for many years, being absorbed in the long work of tracing the evolution of the-narratives of the Elder Days, the legends of Beleriand and Valinor. The publication of Volume III of 'The History of Middle-earth' was already approaching before I had any idea that the 'History' might extend to an account of the writing of The lard of the Rings. During the last three years, however, I have been engaged at intervals in the decipherment and analysis of The Lord of the Rings manuscripts in my possession (a task still far from completed). It has emerged from this that the papers left behind in 1958 consist largely of the earliest phases of composition, although in some cases (and most notably in the first chapter, which was rewritten many times over) successive versions found among these papers bring the narrative to an advanced state. In general, however, it was only the initial notes and earliest drafts, with outlines for the further course of the story, that remained in England when the great bulk of the papers went to Marquette. I do not of course know how it came about that these particular manuscripts came to be left out of the consignment to Marquette; but I think that an explanation in general terms can be found readily enough. Immensely prolific as my father was ('I found not being able to use a pen or pencil as defeating as the loss of her beak would be to a hen,' he wrote to Stanley Unwin in 1963, when suffering from an ailment in his right arm), constantly revising, re-using, beginning again, but never throwing any of his writing away, his papers became inextricably complex, disorganised, and dispersed. It does not seem likely that at the time of the transfer to Marquette he would have been greatly concerned with or have had any precise recollection of the early drafts, some of them sup- planted and overtaken as much as twenty years before; and no doubt they had long since been set aside, forgotten, and buried. However this may be, it is self-evidently desirable that the separated manuscripts should be joined together again, and the whole corpus preserved in one place. This must have been my father's intention at the time of the original sale; and accordingly the manuscripts at present in my keeping will be handed over to Marquette University. The greater part of the material cited or described in this book is found in the papers that remained behind; but the third section of the book (called 'The Third Phase') constituted a difficult prob- lem, because in this case the manuscripts were divided. Most of the chapters in this 'phase' of composition went to Marquette in 1958, but substantial parts of several of them did not. These parts had become separated because my father had rejected them, while using the remainder as constituent elements in new versions. The interpretation of this part of the history would have been alto- gether impossible without very full co-operation from Marquette, and this I have abundantly received. Above all, Mr Taum Santoski has engaged with great skill and care in a complex operation in which we have exchanged over many months annotated copies of the texts; and it has been possible in this way to determine the textual history, and to reconstruct the original manuscripts which my father himself dismembered nearly half a century ago. I record with pleasure and deep appreciation the generous assistance that I have received from him, and also from Mr Charles B. Elston, the Archivist of the Memorial Library at Marquette, from Mr John D. Rateliff, and from Miss Tracy Muench. This attempt to give an account of the first stages in the writing of The Lard of the Rings has been beset by other difficulties than the fact of the manuscripts being widely sundered; difficulties primarily in the interpretation of the sequence of writing, but also in the presentation of the results in a printed book. Briefly, the writing proceeded in a series of 'waves' or (as I have called them in this book) 'phases'. The first chapter was itself reconstituted three times before the hobbits ever left Hobbiton, but the story then went all the way to Rivendell before the impulse failed. My father then started again from the beginning (the 'second phase'), and then again (the 'third phase'); and as new nar- rative elements and new names and relations among the characters appeared they were written into previous drafts, at different times. Parts of a text were taken out and used elsewhere. Alter- native versions were incorporated into the same manuscript, so that the story could be read in more than one way according to the directions given. To determine the sequence of these exceedingly complex movements with demonstrable correctness at all points is scarcely possible. One or-two dates that my father wrote in are insufficient to give more than very limited assistance, and refer- ences to the progress of the work in his letters are unclear and hard to interpret. Differences of script can be very misleading. Thus the determination of the history of composition has to be based very largely on clues afforded by the evolution of names and motives in the narrative itself; but in this there is every possibility of going astray through mistaking the relative dates of additions and alterations. Exemplification of these problems will be found throughout the book. I do not suppose for one moment that I have succeeded in determining the history correctly at every point: indeed there remain several cases where the evidence appears to be contradictory and I can offer no solution. The nature of the manuscripts is such that they will probably always admit of differing interpretations. But the sequence of composition that I propose, after much experimentation with alternative theories, seems to me to fit the evidence very much the best. The earliest plot-outlines and narrative drafts are often barely legible, and become more difficult as the work proceeded. Using any scrap of the wretched paper of the war years that came to hand - sometimes writing not merely on the backs of examination scripts but across the scripts themselves - my father would dash down elliptically his thoughts for the story to come, and his first formulations of narrative, at tearing speed. In the handwriting that he used for rapid drafts and sketches, not int...
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