Following are points noted for the 50th anniversary edition in addition to corrections made in 2005 and recorded in The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion. Some, but not all, of these were addressed in some, but not all, later HarperCollins and Houghton Mifflin printings. Page numbers refer to the 2004 and later one-volume setting. Some later editions have been reset or have different pagination in the preliminaries.
p. xiii, l. 22: For ‘changed in 1965’ read ‘changed to 1965’.
p. xv, l. 14: For ‘assitance’ read ‘assistance’.
p. xix, l. 11: For ‘Yuval Kfir’ read ‘Yuval Welis’.
p. xx, l. 17: For ‘felicitous - subtle’ (with a hyphen) read ‘felicitous – subtle’ (with an en dash).
p. xx, final line: For ‘check copied’ read ‘check copies’.
p. 27, l. 20: The en dash at the beginning of this line should be followed by a space.
p. 50, Ring inscription: As noted in The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion, the inscription reproduced in 2004 printings of the 50th anniversary edition is incorrect, taken from earlier, rejected lettering by Tolkien.
p. 158, footnote: The (volume number) ‘III’ is superfluous in an edition with continuous pagination (and, of course, for editions in one volume).
p. 159, stanzas beginning ‘They rolled the Man slowly up the hill’: Two stanzas have been pushed together. There should be a space following the line ‘and a dish ran up with the spoon’.
p. 170, l. 9: The first line of the poem (‘All that is gold does not glitter,’) should be indented.
p. 373, l. 8: For ‘come to bid our’ read ‘come to bid you our’.
p. 977, l. 19: For ‘Fréalaf’ read ‘Fréaláf’.
p. 1041, n. 1 (etc.): Larry Kuenning has pointed out to us that eight footnotes in Appendix A are printed within quotation marks in the first Ballantine Books edition (1965) but not in the current text. In the first edition of The Return of the King, Tolkien stated in a note on the first page of Appendix A: ‘Actual extracts from the longer annals and tales that are found in the Red Book are placed within quotation marks’ (p. 313; cf. The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion, p. 682). In the second edition this became: ‘Actual extracts from longer annals and tales are placed within quotation marks. . . . Notes within quotation marks are found in the sources. Others are editorial.’ In the first edition, however, only one note appeared within quotation marks, on p. 323 (n. 1, ‘The sceptre was . . . crowning of Aragorn’). Tolkien corrected this error in his revised text for Ballantine Books, where the following footnotes are enclosed within quotation marks (the Ballantine pagination is cited, with new standard pagination in square brackets):
p. 399 [1041], ‘These are a strange . . . feet of the Mountains’
p. 400 [1042], n. 1, ‘In this way the ring . . . at great peril’
p. 400 [1042], n. 2, ‘These were the Stones . . . covered Númenor for ever’
p. 401 [1043], n. 1, ‘The sceptre was . . . crowning of Aragorn’
p. 410 [1050], ‘That law was made . . . Elendil was descended’
pp. 437–8 [1070], ‘For her shield-arm . . . Master of Buckland.]’
p. 443 [1074], ‘It is said that Thorin’s shield . . . got his name’
p. 445 [1076], n. 1, ‘Such dealings with their dead . . . and that is enough’.
In addition, quotation marks were added within note 1 on p. 401 (original edition p. 323, new edition p. 1043), after ‘silver fillet’ and before ‘The sceptre of Númenor’, creating an ‘editorial’ comment within a ‘source’ text.
Tolkien’s original copy for emendations in the Appendices was lost after the Ballantine Books edition was produced; the printed Ballantine sheets therefore became the only possible basis for the subsequent revision of the Appendices in the primary (Allen & Unwin, Houghton Mifflin) hardcover editions. The Allen & Unwin typesetters, however, seem to have overlooked the new quotation marks in the notes, or else a comparison was made with the first edition setting and the marks were dropped because they were not present earlier; and in the process, the existing quotation marks around p. 323, n. 1 were removed. Since later editions looked to the standard hardcover text as a guide to resetting, all have omitted the quotation marks Tolkien meant to include. Even the later resetting by Ballantine Books appears to have been made without comparison against that publisher’s original edition.
We have discussed these points with Christopher Tolkien, who informs us that his father marked the corrections indicated above in a copy of the original printing of The Return of the King.
p. 1079: In the text below the genealogical chart, ‘Dáin I slain by a dragon, 2589’ should be followed by a full stop, by analogy with the accompanying lines of text.
p. 1100: The death date of Bingo Baggins should read ‘1360’. The error ‘1363’ entered in the 1994 edn., from which (unknown to us at the time) HarperCollins took the family trees for the anniversary edition, but was correct in the 2002 copy-text we examined.
p. 1102, Boffin of the Yale family tree: In the table BF4 in The Peoples of Middle-earth, the year of birth of Griffo Boffin (at lower left) is given as 1344. We will have to investigate further to determine whether 1344 or 1346 (as given in the 50th anniversary edition) is correct. We do not know yet if HarperCollins used, as copy-text for the Boffin and Bolger family trees, Christopher Tolkien’s table in Peoples or proofs of the tables as typeset in 1954 but omitted from the 1955 Return of the King.
p. 1111, note 1: For ‘matters’ read ‘other matters’.
p. 1116, l. 12: For ‘dictated’ read ‘indicated’.
p. 1120, l. 19: For ‘8 =d’ read ‘8=d’, with the space after ‘8’ closed up by analogy with other text in this paragraph.
p. 1123, n. 1, l. 3: For ‘hr’ read ‘hr’.
p. 1136, l. 7: For ‘hámfœst’ (with an oe digraph) read ‘hámfæst’ (with an ae digraph).
p. 1137, l. 29: For ‘butterflies to the falcon’ read ‘butterflies to the swift falcon’.
We have been asked which of ‘sword-thain’, as printed (with a hyphen) on p. 777, and ‘swordthain’, as printed (without a hyphen) on pp. 803 and 804, is the correct form. Each is acceptable, but a distinct preference by Tolkien cannot be determined from so small a sampling. The same is true in regard to ‘City of the Kings’ (i.e. Gondor) on p. 973 but ‘city of the Kings’ on p. 1062; and here it may be that Tolkien chose, in the first instance, to capitalize ‘City’ as a means of denoting special import or majesty to the name.
Another question that has been put to us concerns the poem The Road Goes Ever On and On as spoken by Bilbo and Frodo on pp. 35 and 73 respectively. In the first instance, the lines ‘Until it joins some larger way / Where many paths and errands meet’ do not have a comma following ‘way’, but there is a comma after ‘way’ in the second instance. Which is correct? This punctuation has been the same since the first printing of The Fellowship of the Ring, and the manuscripts as presented in The Return of the Shadow offer no help. In the circumstances, we would judge that there is no means of saying that one version or the other is correct and the other is not. Indeed, both may have been intended by Tolkien: Bilbo having set off with ‘eager feet’, it could be argued that the absence of a comma in his verse suggests eagerness, while a comma in Frodo’s verse slows its pace appropriate to his ‘weary feet’.
Merlin DeTardo points out that at p. 1058, l. 11, ‘Elven-home’ has a hyphen, but otherwise in The Lord of the Rings is spelled ‘Elvenhome’. The hyphenated form, which dates from the first printing of The Return of the King, is indeed unique, and had we noticed it we might have suggested that it be regularized to the predominant ‘Elvenhome’ for the sake of consistency.
p. 1149, col. 1, entry for ‘Company of the Ring’: In the penultimate line, for ‘872 Nine Walkers’ read ‘872; Nine Walkers’.
p. 1152, col. 1, entry for ‘Eldacar, of Anor’: For ‘Anor’ read ‘Arnor’.
p. 1156, col. 1, entry for ‘First Age’: For ‘1107’ read ‘1108’.
p. 1156, col. 2, entry for ‘Gamgee, Frodo’: For ‘Frodo’ read ‘Frodo (Frodo Gardner)’.
p. 1157, col. 1, add entry: ‘Gamgee, Holfast (Holfast Gardner) 1105’.
p. 1157, col. 2, entry for ‘Gardner, Frodo’: Delete citation, add cross-reference: ‘see Gamgee, Frodo (Frodo Gardner)’.
p. 1157, col. 2, entry for ‘Gardner, Holfast’: Delete citation, add cross-reference: ‘see Gamgee, Holfast (Holfast Gardner)’.
p. 1159, col. 1, entry for ‘Grip’: For ‘Grip’ read ‘Grip (Farmer Maggot’s dog)’ to be consistent with our entries for Fang and Wolf.
p. 1160, add entry: ‘Heathen kings 825, 853’.
p. 1168, col. 1, entry for ‘Oliphaunt’: The citations should read, in correct order and without repetition, ‘646, 647, 661, 662, 675, 811, 828, 843, 845, 846, 848, 858, 937, 957, 987’.
p. 1171, col. 1, entry for ‘Rúmil’: Replace with two entries:
Rúmil (Elf of Lothlórien) 343, 344, 346, 347
Rúmil (Noldo, inventor of letters) 1117
p. 1173, col. 2, add entry: ‘Spiders 723; see also Shelob; Ungoliant’.
p. 1175, col. 2, entry for ‘Took, Hildigard’, add citation: 1103.
We would like to thank the Departamento de Traduccion Irreverente, Merlin DeTardo, Timothy Fisher, Carl Hostetter, Yuval Kfir, Larry Kuenning, Calvin Rice, and Tik (Pekka Tuomisto) for calling some of these errors to our attention.
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