Our thanks to Svetlana Likhacheva for pointing out some of these errors. Additions to this page since its previous update (18 February 2026) are indicated by a dagger (†).
p. 11, l. 4: For ‘Leila’ read ‘Leila Keane’.
† p. 22, caption for fig. 5: For ‘Book II’ read ‘Book I’.
† p. 48, l. 12 from bottom: Delete ‘(in The Hobbit the ‘Last Inn’)’. The ‘Last Inn’ is mentioned in Tolkien’s draft revision of The Hobbit in 1960, as published in John D. Rateliff’s History of The Hobbit, but is nowhere mentioned in the standard text of the work.
† p. 52, second paragraph: We failed to note that in the sketch-map reproduced as fig. 31, Tolkien altered in blue pencil the course of the smaller, tributary stream south of Rivendell so that it was not distinct from the upper stream (marked ‘Bruinen or Loudwater’) – as drawn in published maps in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit – but conjoined to the east as well as to the west. ‘Thus’, Christopher Tolkien writes in The Return of the Shadow, ‘the house at Rivendell is at the western end of land enclosed between two streams coming down from the Mountains, parting, and then joining again’ (p. 205). This would have resolved the problem that the house is above ‘the loud-flowing Bruinen’ in Tolkien’s text (bk. II, ch. 2) and next to a single river in all of his illustrations of Rivendell (e.g. figs. 33, 34); but the standard maps have remained as they were.
† p. 52, l. 13: For ‘Moors’ read ‘Moor’.
p. 140, l. 11 from bottom: For ‘fig. 136’ read ‘fig. 137’.
p. 151, l. 12 from bottom: Delete the closing quotation mark.
p. 179, l. 8 after titling: For ‘south-south-west’ read ‘south-south-east’.
p. 205, ll. 1–2 after titling: For ‘Tolkien also made . . . completed Book VI. It has’ read ‘In early 1955 Tolkien made a new, large map of Rohan, Gondor, and the western part of Mordor (fig. 161). This has’. (This correction was made in the 2023 HarperCollins edition.)
p. 205, l. 14 after titling: For ‘Eilenath’ read ‘Eilenach’.
p. 209, l. 7 from bottom: For ‘tehtar’ read ‘tehta’.
Three additional small sketches appear in Words, Phrases and Passages in Various Tongues in The Lord of the Rings, a list and commentary compiled by Tolkien after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, perhaps initially in response to a list of names, places, and words compiled by a librarian in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire in 1959. The work was published in 2007, edited by Christopher Gilson, as Parma Eldalamberon 17. On p. 22 is a sketch of Tol Brandir between Amon Lhaw and Amon Hen; and on p. 36 are a sketch of the peak of Caradhras, ‘tapering upwards (like Matterhorn)’, compared with a sketch of Celebdil, ‘simply crowned by a smaller pinnacle’.