Addenda and Corrigenda to
The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion
Second Revised Edition (2014)

With the 2014 edition, the Reader’s Companion was brought back into hardcover by HarperCollins (in the United States, Houghton Mifflin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have published only the original, unrevised hardcover edition since 2005). We had been able to include a few additions and corrections in the HarperCollins trade paperback of 2008, and for 2014 were asked to make further revisions. Severe pressures of time, however, which included Wayne reconstructing 150 printed pages when the original electronic typesetting file proved unavailable, made it essential that we refrain as much as possible from adding pages or introducing new page breaks, so that we would not have to substantially revise spacing in the text or change citations in the index. Therefore, for the most part, we limited ourselves to corrections and brief additions such that would fit within the existing text or in blank spaces at the ends of chapters. Only in a few instances, where we felt it most important to expand our text (in reply to comments and questions we had received), did we lightly alter page breaks, and thus a handful of index entries, still without increasing the overall number of pages.

Here The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion is abbreviated ‘RC’ for convenience, e.g. ‘RC:655’ = Reader’s Companion, p. 655.

List of works facing the title-page: For ‘Letters by’ read ‘The Letters of’.

p. xvii, l. 19: For ‘within’ read ‘without’.

p. xxi, third paragraph: Tolkien’s letter to Furth of 31 August notably refers to the Hobbit sequel as ‘The Lord of the Ring’ (sic). Tolkien would come customarily to use the title, in the plural, by 2 February 1939 (again in a letter to Furth, see Letters, p. 41). In the Marquette University Tolkien papers is a manuscript leaf with the title The Magic Ring, but this is struck through and replaced with ‘? The Lord of the Rings’. On the same sheet is a manuscript note by Tolkien, ‘Prisca [Priscilla] & Chris [Christopher] say The Lord of the Rings’. See Catherine McIlwaine, Maker of Middle-earth (2018), pp. 330–1.

p. xxxiii, l. 14 from bottom: We say that Tolkien ‘proposed’ these volume titles, but should have quoted the beginning of the first sentence in the block quotation: ‘I now suggest as titles of the volumes’. There is perhaps little or no difference between our ‘proposed’ and Tolkien’s ‘suggest’, but there may be a shade of meaning; and as a matter of cold fact, we do not know if in this letter Tolkien put forward his own ideas for titles or was agreeing with titles suggested by Rayner Unwin at their meeting in Oxford that same day – that is, we do not know who devised the titles The Fellowship of the Ring (a phrase which, as we point out elsewhere, does not appear in The Lord of the Rings until late in the final part, though the final chapter of Book II is ‘The Breaking of the Fellowship’), or The Two Towers, or even The Return of the King though this appears in Tolkien’s letter to Rayner of 8 August 1953 (Letters, p. 170). We might say much the same about our paragraph on the title The Two Towers on p. 353, where again we say that Tolkien suggested it, though he may have been only accepting a suggestion by Rayner.

But this is probably excessive quibbling, and with ourselves.

p. xl, first paragraph: In our attempt to be brief about a complex subject, we failed to say that the revisions Tolkien made to The Lord of the Rings in response to the Ace Books affair were meant to be used first for the authorized paperback from Ballantine Books, then for a new hardcover edition by Houghton Mifflin, and then for a new hardcover from Allen & Unwin. But by mid-December 1965 the new British edition was needed urgently, and in the event was published before the Houghton Mifflin second edition. All changes in the Ballantine edition were transferred to the master set of proofs at Houghton Mifflin and sent to Allen & Unwin, except for Tolkien’s revisions to the Appendices, which were lost. Allen & Unwin therefore had to reset the Appendices based on the printed Ballantine text, and in this way new errors were introduced. As Tolkien wrote in a report in February 1966 (Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins), the loss of the ‘emended sheets for the Appendices’ complicated his efforts to revise the end matter, which was ‘desirable, in view of my own considerations and criticisms by keen-eyed critics’; and he found confusion in notes in his check-copy of the Ballantine Return of the King among ‘changed sent to HM [Houghton Mifflin], those suggested but reserved for possible inclusion in a new AU [Allen & Unwin] edition, and those few discovered as necessary after I had sent the sheets to USA.’ In general he contented himself with correcting errors in the Ballantine text, ‘avoiding the introduction of serious discrepancies between B[allantine] and a new AU’. Errors introduced in the Ballantine setting and carried forward into later editions are still coming to light (e.g. mislabelled or conjoined entries in the Tale of Years, pp. 1089 and 1090), which we and Christopher Tolkien have treated as points to be corrected whenever the evidence of his father’s intentions is clear.

pp. lv–lxvii, ‘The Maps of The Lord of the Rings’: The first published map of Middle-earth, drawn by Christopher Tolkien, was reproduced in The Art of The Lord of the Rings, fig. 160. The same map, annotated by Tolkien and Pauline Baynes in preparation for Baynes’s Map of Middle-earth, was reproduced in Catherine McIlwaine, Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth (2018), pp. 382–3, and in McIlwaine, Tolkien Treasures (2018), pp. 138 (complete), 139 (detail). The map of Rohan, Gondor, and Mordor was reproduced in Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, pp. 376 (detail), 396–7 (complete).

p. lvi, l. 15 from bottom: The place-names Long Cleeve and Sandy Cleeve have the element cleeve ‘cliff, steep hill’.

p. lvii, l. 14 from bottom: Here we note that ‘Bindbole’ is ‘so spelled’, and two lines later, that Brockenborings ‘is spelled thus’, and other examples may be found of ‘spelled’ so spelled. More frequently in the Reader’s Companion, however, we have used ‘spelt’. Both, in fact, are permissible according to our authorities, the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English and the Oxford Style Manual, and equal use of each form as quoted in the larger Oxford English Dictionary is noted by H.W. Fowler in his examination of ‘-t and ed’ in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (though personally he leaned – or leant – towards -t); still, only one form should be used in a text. The present authors know that they occasionally differ in spelling preferences, but apparently failed to notice our variation of ‘spelled’ and ‘spelt’ when writing the Reader’s Companion; and for practical purposes, there’s nothing to be done now except to confirm that the Americans and the English are two peoples divided by a common language, or at least by their orthography. We do recall regularizing to ‘spelled’ in the Companion and Guide (except for one stray Scull-Hammond ‘spelt’ in the Chronology). Tolkien himself used ‘spelt’, and we retained this of course in quotation.

p. lix, l. 16: For ‘Place-Names’ read ‘Place-names’. Our entirely arbitrary preference in this book – but not followed consistently – was to use hyphenated ‘place-name(s)’, and to use lower-case ‘-names’ in titles of books with ‘Place-names’, but upper-case ‘-Name’ seems appropriate for ‘English Place-Name Society’ and in common usage.

pp. 7–8, note for They dressed in bright colours . . . : Janka Kaščákova, ‘“It Snowed Food and Rained Drink” in The Lord of the Rings’, Middle-earth and Beyond: Essays on the World of J.R.R. Tolkien (2010), discusses the importance of food and drink in Tolkien’s characterization of Hobbits, in their everyday life, in their songs and speech, and in how they react when in uncertain or dangerous circumstances. In the same volume, Kathleen Dubs finds in ‘No Laughing Matter’ that most of the humour in The Lord of the Rings is associated with the Hobbits not only in their own jests, banter, and reactions, but also in their interaction with other characters.

p. 15, ll. 9–14 from bottom: John Garth notes in The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien (2020) that Old Norse Thorketil ‘Thor’s cauldron’, shortened to Tóki, is ‘a source of the English surname Took’ (p. 76). Basil Cottle, The Penguin Dictionary of Surnames (1967), cites Took as a ‘pet form’ of Thorkil, related to Thurkettle.

p. 23, ll. 21–2: A reader has pointed out that the historical suling, hide, and carucate are measures of area, whereas Tolkien uses sullong as a measure of length. It was not our intention to equate Tolkien’s sullong with the historical suling, only to point out that a sullong (suling) exists in our world, and that Tolkien presumably adopted this alternate spelling as the name of one of the Hobbit ‘long measures’ in one of his manuscript workings.

p. 31, ll. 9–12 from bottom: Tolkien named the inn The White Horse in draft before being changed to The Prancing Pony.

p. 33, fourth paragraph: Boffin was also the name of a baker’s near Carfax in Oxford, on the St Aldates corner, in the nineteen-twenties.

p. 42, ll. 3–4: On Breton precursors of the name Meriadoc, see further, Carl Phelpstead in Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (2011), p. 103.

p. 52, ll. 12–23: On eleventy-first, see further, the discussion of eleventy-one in Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner, The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (2006), pp. 112–13.

p. 56, l. 16 from bottom: In Amon Hen 199 (May 2006), p. 23, David Doughan comments that we could have said more about the word gaffer. While we would not go as far as he suggests, we should have mentioned that gaffer is recorded in general English dialect use also with the meaning ‘grandfather’, and is found ‘prefixed to a proper name as a term of respect’ (Joseph Wright, English Dialect Dictionary). Also, Tolkien’s Oxford publisher, bookseller, and neighbour Basil Blackwell was himself nicknamed ‘the Gaffer’.

p. 56, ll. 14–15 from bottom: One Ivy Bush opened in the Hagley Road, Edgbaston, in 1861, and would have been known to Tolkien when he lived in Birmingham.

pp. 56–7, note for They lived on the Hill itself . . . : The place-name Bagshot is found in both Surrey and Wiltshire, with disagreement among authorities as to its origin. We note in particular -shot as from Old English *scēot, but neglected to deal with Bag- except in terms of folk-etymology. Eilert Ekwall in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names (4th edn., 1960) explores a variety of possible derivations for Bag- under ‘Bagley’: ‘In Scand[inavian] languages bagge means “a wether, a ram”, [Middle Dutch] bagghe means “a small pig”. There may have been an [Old English] word bacga denoting some animal’ (p. 23). A.H. Smith discusses Old English *bagga ‘bag’ at length in his English Place-name Elements (1970), eventually sugesting that the word ‘must have had extensions of meaning to suit the [place-names], either topographical “hill resembling a bag” (which would be appropriate in some [place-names]) or, as with the Swed[ish], [Middle Dutch] words, “an object or creature resembling a bag”. . . . The most appropriate native wild animal is the badger . . .’ (p. 17). Referring to Anglo-Saxon personal names, the Cambridge Dictionary of Place-names makes the Surrey Bagshot ‘Bacga’s nook’ and the one in Wiltshire ‘Beocc’s gate’, without elaboration.

p. 57, note for gentlehobbit: Merlin deTardo, referring to discussion on theonering.net, has called our attention to Tolkien’s use of ‘old man’ to refer to Gaffer Gamgee in Book I, Chapter 3 (‘The old man seemed put out.’) in contrast with his care to use ‘gentlehobbit’ rather than ‘gentleman’. Tolkien may well have chosen here, as earlier in The Hobbit, to have emended ‘old man’ to ‘old fellow’ (or the like). It has also been noted that in The Lord of the Rings he used compound words such as kinsman, postman, and waterman to apply to Hobbits, to which we would add (off the top of the head) the surnames Holman and Sandyman; but one could argue that kinsman, etc. are not only (in traditional, if not politically correct, grammar) gender-neutral but also species-neutral, while gentleman (‘gentle’ + ‘man’) cannot be gender-neutral and therefore was a good candidate for ‘hobbit’ transformation. While there are ‘man’-less alternatives to kinsman, etc. – such as relative – they have too contemporary a tone relative to the rest of the Lord of the Rings prose; and to have used instead ‘kinshobbit’, ‘posthobbit’, and so forth would have overdone the conceit.

p. 59, note for Gorbadoc: Change paragraph heading to: And Mr. Drogo was staying at Brandy Hall with his father-in-law, old Master Gorbadoc, as he often did after his marriage. Add new first paragraph: Gaffer Gamgee says that Drogo Baggins was staying with Gorbadoc Brandybuck at the time of Drogo’s death by drowning, which family trees in Appendix C date to 1380; but according to the Brandybuck family tree, Gorbadoc died seventeen years earlier, in 1363.

p. 65, l. 6 from bottom: As backrapper, the word is recorded by Joseph Wright in his English Dialect Dictionary as in the Warwickshire dialect. See also Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner, The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (2006), pp. 92–3.

p. 66, add after l. 18:

p. 69, l. 15 from bottom: The ‘note for p. 13’ is on p. 40 of the Reader’s Companion.

p. 72, l. 10 from bottom: For ‘Letters’ read ‘Letters,’ (adding a comma).

p. 78, between ll. 2 and 3, add:

p. 78, ll. 16–17 from bottom: For ‘place name’ read ‘place-name’.

p. 83, l. 9: For ‘attempts, which he felt too large and sprawling;’ read ‘attempts,’.

p. 83, l. 10: For ‘sixteenth’ read ‘eighteenth’.

p. 83, l. 8 from bottom: For ‘The second line of the two lines’ read ‘The first of the two lines’.

p. 88, ll. 2–20: In regard to Aragorn, see further, Elizabeth M. Stephen, Hobbit to Hero: The Making of Tolkien’s King (2012) and Angela P. Nicholas, Aragorn: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Undervalued Hero (2012). (See also Christina’s blog posts here and here.)

p. 97, block quotation at foot of page: At the end of the first paragraph, the three-dot ellipsis should be a four-dot ellipsis, i.e. including the full stop after ‘again’.

p. 103, l. 21: For ‘passage’ read ‘words’.

pp. 104–5, note for ‘Elen sila lúmenn’ omentielvo . . . : Further on the alteration of omentielmo to omentielvo, see comments by Carl F. Hostetter in ‘Five Late Quenya Volitive Inscriptions’, Vinyar Tengwar 49 (June 2007), pp. 38, 49.

p. 108, l. 2: In regard to the phrase ‘netted stars’, in some cultures the Pleiades are described in terms of a sieve or wickerwork.

p. 108, ll. 4–6: For ‘cluster of seven stars’ read (to avoid quibbling) ‘cluster of stars’. It has been suggested to us that this should read ‘nine stars’, even though the cluster actually contains hundreds of stars, most of which are not visible to the naked eye; but historically, the Pleiades have been referred to as seven stars (in some cultures, six), and are named, as we state, after the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione (who themselves have stars named for them in the constellation).

p. 108, note on Borgil: In ‘A Definitive Identification of Tolkien’s “Borgil”: An Astronomical and Literary Approach’, Tolkien Studies 2 (2005), Kristine Larsen also argues that Borgil should be identified with Aldebaran, ‘the sole astronomical object which truly fits the etymological, astronomical, and literary evidence’. ‘However,’ she adds, ‘in the end, one can never know with absolute certainty whether Tolkien meant for Aldebaran to be Borgil (as astronomical inaccuracies do infrequently appear in his work), unless further manuscripts are discovered which shed light on his thinking in this matter’ (p. 168).

p. 116, ll. 5–8: We quote from Tolkien’s Nomenclature that ‘-windle [as a second element] does not actually occur [in English place-names] (withywindle was modelled on withywind, a name of the convolvulus or bindweed)’. As Jason Fisher has pointed out, however, there is in Surrey a ‘Windle Brook’, near Windlesham (and Bagshot). Eilert Ekwall suggests that Windle Brook may be a back-formation from Windlesham (perhaps from ‘Winel’s hām’), though ‘the name of the brook may have been [unrecorded Old English] Windol ‘winding brook’, the name being a derivative of Old English windan “to wind”’ (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names (1960), p. 522). The latter point is also noted by Tom Shippey in The Road to Middle-earth (1992), p. 98. (The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-names (2004), p. 684, declares the origin of Windlesham ‘partly uncertain’, ‘possibly “the settlement with or by a windlass”, OE *windels + hām’. The element of ‘winding’ is nonetheless present.)

p. 116, note for a dark black bundle: The text from The Hunt for the Ring given here continues in Marquette MSS 4/2/36 with a comment by Tolkien that the Nazgûl would not touch the Baranduin, as its waters were ‘Elvish’. In Unfinished Tales, p. 344, Christopher Tolkien comments that his father ‘nowhere explained the Ringwraiths’ fear of water’, and quotes relevant words from MSS 4/2/36. ‘But it is not made clear’, he adds, how the Ringwraiths ‘crossed other rivers that lay in their path, such as the Greyflood. . . . My father did indeed note that the idea was difficult to sustain.’ Nonetheless, it is an issue we might have done well to explore in a note. Our memories are unclear as to why we did not.

p. 123, between ll. 2 and 3, add:

p. 137, ll. 13–17 from bottom: Although the Oxford English Dictionary cites as the earliest use of barrow-wight Lang’s Essays in Little (1891), Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner in The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (2006), p. 216, note that the compound appeared much earlier still, in Grettis Saga: The Story of Grettir the Strong, translated by William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon (London, 1869), Chapter 18: ‘Everything in their way was kicked out of place, the barrow-wight setting on with hideous eagerness. . . .’

p. 138, ll. 21–32: Nelson Goering has remarked (on the Tolkien Society’s Facebook forum, August 2020) that ‘Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn’ recalls a line from Barzaz Breiz, a collection of folk poems by Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué known to Tolkien: ‘J’ai vu l’oeuf avant de voir la poule blanche; j’ai vu le gland avant de voir l’arbre’ (‘I saw the egg before I saw the white hen; I saw the acorn before I saw the tree’).

p. 157, note for Elves (and Hobbits) always refer to the Sun as She: The switch of gender is explored further by Yvette L. Kisor in ‘“Elves (and Hobbits) always refer to the Sun as She”: Some Notes on a Note in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings’, Tolkien Studies 4 (2007).

p. 171, l. 13 from bottom: In The World of J.R.R. Tolkien (2020) John Garth suggests that the river names Loudwater and Bruinen owe a debt to Lauterbrunnen, a ‘span of woods and meadows’ in Switzerland, which Tolkien visited in 1911, filled ‘with the sound of water, tumbling in seventy-two falls’ (p. 86). We comment on the relationship between Lauterbrunnen and Rivendell on p. 203.

p. 174, l. 1: We might also have glossed morrowless ‘without a tomorrow’, i.e. lasting forever, interminable.

p. 182, note for he sang over it a slow song . . . : Edward Pettit has suggested in ‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s Use of an Old English Charm’, Mallorn 40 (November 2002), that Aragorn’s use of athelas while singing was inspired by the Anglo-Saxon charm known as ‘Against a Sudden Stitch’, meant to heal, among other things, a sudden stabbing pain. See also Carol A. Leibiger, ‘Charms’, in J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (2006).

p. 188, note for There stood the trolls . . . : In discussing an example of Scandinavian folklore, W.A. Craigie commented that ‘it is sudden death to night-trolls if day breaks upon them, the dawning was their destruction, so that each of them became a pillar of rock, and are now those which stand there’ (Scandinavian Folk-Lore: Illustrations of the Traditional Beliefs of the Northern Peoples (1896), p. 62).

p. 202, add after l. 18:

p. 210ff., notes on Eärendil Was a Mariner: Paul J. Smith has commented on ‘an interesting example of a concentration of technical French’ in the poem, that is, a concentration of French loanwords, such as panoply, habergeon, scabbard, and chalcedony. See ‘French Connections in Middle-earth: The Medieval Legacy’, in Kuijpers, Vink, and van Zon, Tolkien among Scholars (2016), p. 123.

p. 215, ll. 16–17: Replace this sentence as follows: ‘This is the only line to survive intact from the version of the poem (Errantry) published in the Oxford Magazine; see note for p. 233.’ The gloss to which our reference ‘see last note for p. 236’ leads has no relevance to the survival of ‘his scabbard of chalcedony’, and at this distance of time we cannot recall our intentions. It may be that we meant the ‘see’ reference to be placed elsewhere.

p. 218, ll. 17–18 from bottom: On flammifer, see further, Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner in The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (2006), pp. 132–3. Flammifer is Latin; compare aquifer ‘water-bearer’, conifer ‘cone-bearer’, etc.

p. 234, first paragraph: In draft, Tolkien played with other names for the southern land: Harwan, Silharrows, Sunharrowland, Harrowland. All, Christopher Tolkien notes, ‘are derived from the Old English Sigelhearwan ‘Ethiopians’’ (The Treason of Isengard, p. 439) and contain the element Sigel ‘sun’.

pp. 248–9, note for in the Riddermark of Rohan: On the relation of mark and march(es), see p. 28.

p. 257, l. 8: For ‘thought’ read ‘though’.

p. 265, add after l. 8:

pp. 280–1, note for What does the writing say?: In this note we suggested that Frodo’s inability to read the Tengwar was related to its mode (for he also says, ‘I thought I knew the elf-letters, but I cannot read these’), but might also have commented on the fact that the script, reproduced in the picture of the doors of Moria, is somewhat eccentric, and so difficult to read, especially given the unusual nature of the inscribed medium. Indeed, the design is only being ‘guessed’. Tolkien refers to the letters as ‘interlacing’; in draft (The Return of the Shadow, p. 449) they are described as ‘tangled’.

p. 287, add before l. 8 from bottom:

p. 290, final line: For ‘p. 337’ read ‘p. 323’.

p. 296, add entry after 330 (I: 344): The Balrog reached the bridge:

p. 323, add after 363 (I: 378): ‘There’s some devilry at work:

p. 327, note for the long home of those that fall in battle: In Amon Hen 199 (May 2006), p. 24, Helen Armstrong adds to our note that ‘“long home” is a term that exists in Middle English, meaning simply “the grave”’. Tolkien himself comments on the phrase at the start of Some Contributions to Middle English Lexicography (Review of English Studies, April 1925, p. 210), noting an unrecorded occurrence (‘langan hame’) in the Old English Vision of Leofric which is ‘specially interesting in showing that the expression meant “grave” and not “the future life,” or “heaven”’.

p. 340, ll. 17–21: Paul J. Smith also has compared Galadriel and Gimli’s exchange to courtly love. He notes that they express themselves in French loanwords (such as gentle, gracious, courteous), and finds in their dialogue ‘an amusing wink at Chrétien’s [de Troyes] love story between Lancelot and Guinevere.’ Gimli asking for a strand of Galadriel’s hair (‘which surpasses the gold of the earth’, etc.) ‘seems to be a condensed form of Lancelot’s ecstasy when he finds some hairs of Queen Guinevere. . . . [Quoting Chrétien:] “Gold a hundred thousand times refined, and melted down as many times, would be darker than is night compared with the brightest summer day . . . , if one were to see the gold and set it beside this hair”’ (‘French Connections in Middle-earth: The Medieval Legacy’, in Kuijpers, Vink, and van Zon, Tolkien among Scholars (2016), p. 132).

p. 343, l. 11 after titling: For ‘Berennyn’ read ‘Berennyr’.

pp. 343–4, note on the Limlight: As John Garth has pointed out (The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, 2020), the first element of Limlight recalls Lyme, the name of the river on which Lyme Regis, Dorset, is situated, where Tolkien took holidays. Ekwall relates Lyme to Welsh llif, Cornish lif ‘flood, stream’.

p. 361, note for the hilt and shards of his sword: Julian Wilson remarks in correspondence that the plural hilts has the same sense as the singular hilt. Tolkien evidently came to prefer hilt and emended some instances of hilts in The Lord of the Rings. Later editors have noted his preference and applied it to corrected texts of this work.

p. 362, add before the note for p. 419 (II:21):

p. 365, note for He is smaller than the others: We examined this point in the Lord of the Rings papers at Marquette, and found that ‘other’ was a typesetting error for ‘others’ in the original printing of The Two Towers. Christopher Tolkien has since written to us that his note in The Treason of Isengard (p. 404, n. 15) was not meant as a suggestion, but to indicate a clearly evidenced error.

p. 372, ll. 19–25: On issues of connecting the language of Rohan with Old Mercian, see Nelson Goering, ‘Old Mercian: From Beowulf to Tolkien’s Rohan’, in Kuijpers, Vink, and van Zon, Tolkien among Scholars (2016).

p. 383, ll. 7 –8: More than one reader has queried our statement that ain’t is ‘generally pronounced very like “ent”’, and rightly so. The general pronunciation of ain’t, according to current dictionaries as well as the Oxford English Dictionary, uses the rising vowel sound as in day, not the short e of went. What we should have said was that the construction of Treebeard’s ‘Ents but ain’t’ strongly suggests that Tolkien meant to make a joke based on a similar pronunciation of Ent and ain’t. Many readers have taken it as such, e.g. in the Rómenna Meeting Report of 24 August 1985, it is ‘noted that in at least some British dialects, the words “Ent” and “ain’t” are probably pronounced identically’. We have added a note, above, for p. 44 (‘sees things that ain’t there’), citing research into Tolkien’s use of dialectal English by Nils-Lennart Johannesson and noting that, according to The Linguistic Atlas of England (1978), the predominant pronunciation of ain’t in Warwickshire and Oxfordshire is, in fact, [ent] and not [eınt]. Johannesson calls Treebeard’s statement (‘There are Ents and Ents, you know; or there are Ents and things that look like Ents but ain’t’) ‘a quibble of Shakespearean proportions’ (‘Studies in Tolkien’s Language III: Sure as Shiretalk – On Linguistic Variation in Hobbit Speech (Part One)’, Arda 5 (1988 for 1985), p. 42). (The informants in the dialect survey were born in the 1870s and 1880s, and surveyed in the 1950s and early 1960s.)

p. 385, add after l. 7:

p. 392, note for His fire was quenched . . .: In Amon Hen 199 (May 2006), p. 25, Helen Armstrong suggests that the balrog as ‘a thing of slime’ ‘is a fine description of a cold, wet, fire-extinguished balrog’. Our comment was not meant to identify the balrog of Moria as itself a shape-changer, only that (as we wrote, emphasis added) ‘Gandalf’s account recalls shape-changers in myth and legend’.

p. 399: Add following l. 8: ‘See further, Thomas Honegger, ‘The Rohirrim: “Anglo-Saxons on Horseback”? An Inquiry into Tolkien’s Sources’, Tolkien and His Sources, ed. by Jason Fisher (2013).’

p. 399, ll. 13ff.: On the comparison of Aragorn’s song to The Wanderer, Nelson Goering has commented (Tolkien Society Facebook page, 3 September 2018):

p. 416, add after the fifth paragraph:

p. 422, add after l. 19:

pp. 435–9: In regard to the ride of Gandalf and Pippin to Minas Tirith, Tolkien wrote to Elsie Honeybourne on 21 December 1967 that ‘an easing of tension was needed at the end of the “Book” (but of course provided instinctively and not by planning). To ride with Gandalf must have been like being borne by a Guardian Angel, with stern gentleness a most comforting combination to children (as we all are)’ (Bloomsbury Auctions online, sale of 24 May 2007).

p. 444, l. 11: Tom Shippey discusses ninnyhammer in his ‘History in Words: Tolkien’s Ruling Passion’, The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder (2006), pp. 32–4.

p. 445, ll. 13–14: Tom Shippey makes a brief comment about noodles, relating it (as we did, through the Oxford English Dictionary) to ninnyhammer, in his ‘History in Words’ (2006), p. 33.

p. 467, add at bottom:

p. 519, add before first heading:

p. 521, l. 12: In regard to daymeal, Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner in The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (2006), p. 101, cite the gloss of dag-mál in Cleasby and Vigfusson’s Icelandic–English Dictionary: ‘one of the divisions of the day . . . synonymous with dagverðarmál breakfast-time . . . when the ancient Icel[anders] used to take their chief meal, opposed to náttmál, night-meal or supper-time’. Tolkien, however, places the ‘daymeal’ of Gondor in the evening.

p. 550, note for before ever a ship sailed hither from the West: Extend the boldfaced quotation as: We will burn like heathen kings before ever a ship sailed hither from the West. The gloss on heathen in our note for p. 853 (III: 129), Reader’s Companion p. 573, should appear at this point, the first use of ‘heathen’ in the story.

John R. Holmes notes in ‘“Like Heathen Kings”: Religion as Palimpsest in Tolkien’s Fiction’, The Ring and the Cross: Christianity and the Writings of J.R.R. Tolkien (2011), that ‘the word “heathen” jumps out at the reader in these two passages [new edn., pp. 825 and 853]. . . . It seems out of place in a novel in which . . . religious references are conspicuous by their absence’ (p. 119). And he comments that ‘surely a philologist as careful as Tolkien, in a work that had been as heavily revised as The Lord of the Rings, could not have been insensitive to the semantic dissonance created by the word “heathen” in the Denethor passages. He would have known that his readers would apprehend the word as an exclusively Christian term . . .’ (p. 121). Holmes follows with a discussion of the etymological associations of the word, and points out that Tolkien often used ‘common words still in circulation . . . but in contexts that subtly suggested that another, and as it turns out, older, meaning must be showing through, like the earliest inscriptions on a palimpsest’ (p. 123).

p. 562, note for dwimmerlaik: See also Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner, The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (2006), pp. 108–10.

p. 573, note for only the heathen kings . . . : Although this is the most appropriate place (i.e. p. 853 or III: 129) for our comments on suicide, we should have glossed heathen at its first use in The Lord of the Rings, p. 825 (III: 98–9): ‘We will burn like heathen kings before ever a ship sailed hither from the West.’

p. 580, l. 20: The separate note for ‘the high tongue’ should be joined, as a separate paragraph, to the preceding note, in which the glossed words are included in the quotation, thus: The high tongue is Quenya.

p. 580, ll. 1–2 from bottom: In the Lambengolmor Tolkien linguistics forum, message 850, Fredrik Ström correctly commented that our gloss asëa aranion ‘leaf of kings’ is not attested in Tolkien’s writings. In message 851, however, Arden R. Smith defended this translation as an extrapolation from the gloss of athelas ‘kingsfoil’ in an unpublished etymology by Tolkien together with ‘the transparent meaning of aranion “of kings”’.

p. 655, l. 15 after titling: In the Lambengolmor Tolkien linguistics forum, message 844, Fredrik Ström queried our comment ‘See also note for p. 107’, suggesting that ‘p. 10’ (i.e. our note on hayward) was meant instead. Although too much time has now passed to be sure, we are inclined to think that we did mean ‘p. 107’, referring to our mention of guards at the Hay Gate. This query does point, unfortunately, to a regrettable duplication of comments on hayward on RC:35 and RC:655. The first note was written early in the project and forgotten 620 pages later.

p. 658, ll. 10–20: John Garth in The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien (2020) considers it a ‘safe bet’ that the Three-Farthing Stone was inspired by the Four Shire Stone ‘marking the juncture of Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire’ (p. 21).

p. 666, l. 4: Add to the note: Shale is the shell or outer covering of the nut.

p. 668, ll. 18–19: For ‘the proceedings of the October 2004 Marquette University Tolkien conference, forthcoming)’ read ‘The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull (2006)’.

p. 691, add following the heading for 1041, n. 1:

In the first edition of The Lord of the Rings, only one footnote (but substantial parts of the text proper) in Appendix A appeared within quotation marks. When Tolkien revised his text for the 1965 Ballantine Books second edition, he added quotation marks around seven other footnotes; and as Christopher Tolkien has informed us that his father added the quotation marks to the same footnotes in a personal copy of the Allen & Unwin Return of the King, there is no question that Tolkien meant them to be included. When in 1966 Allen & Unwin came to revise their standard hardback edition, Tolkien’s original copy for the Ballantine revisions had been lost, and the Ballantine setting became the default copy-text for the Appendices. But either the typesetters overlooked the added quotation marks, or they compared the copy-text with the first edition setting and omitted the quotation marks in error; and in the process, they also deleted the quotation marks that had been present in the setting of 1955. Moreover, we have found in the Tolkien papers at Marquette University that the footnotes were not in quotation marks as the text approached its final form and was sent to the printers. In the first proof, Tolkien added quotation marks to the note beginning ‘The sceptre . . .’ – the one note to have quotation marks in the first edition – but only to this note. And very curiously, in another proof, the note was marked to have quotation marks added, but those proofreading marks were then struck through. We can only think that the footnotes did not receive close attention as the writing and production of the Appendices proceeded in fits and starts in 1954 and 1955, with not a little confusion over available space and with Tolkien under pressure from Allen & Unwin to complete the final volume of his work.

p. 691, l. 6 from bottom: Add following the heading:

p. 691, between ll. 3 and 4 from bottom, add:

p. 694, note for the Tower of the Dome of Osgiliath: One reader takes issue with our statement that ‘domes (as a matter of engineering) cannot have towers’, pointing out that some domes have cupolas (evidently taking cupola by its broad definition as an ornamental structure atop a dome or roof). He also observes that some cathedrals (for instance) have bell towers separate from the main building. None of this, however, makes the phrase ‘Tower of the Dome of Osgiliath’ less curious or provides, to us, an adequate explanation.

p. 695, between ll. 2 and 3 from bottom, add:

p. 698, note for he became a friend of Gandalf . . . : For a lengthy discussion of Gandalf in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings relative to Merlin in Arthurian tales, see Frank P. Riga, ‘Gandalf and Merlin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Adoption and Transformation of a Literary Tradition’, Mythlore 27, nos. 1/2, whole nos. 103/104 (Fall/Winter 2008). The subject is also considered by Carl Phelpstead in Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (2011), pp. 81–5.

p. 702, note for There is now no ship . . . : In Amon Hen 199 (May 2006), p. 25, Helen Armstrong suggests that we quibble too much over Arwen’s phrase ‘There is now no ship that would bear me hence’: ‘Had Arwen been able to cross the Sea, she could have done so then, never mind the Havens. It seems likely from this and other context . . . that Arwen could not sail, will she or nill she.’ This may be so.

p. 703, ll. 13–14: For ‘forthcoming in the proceedings of the October 2004 Marquette University Tolkien conference’ read ‘in The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull (2006)’.

p. 705, between ll. 12 and 13, add:

p. 707, between ll. 6 and 7, add:

p. 707, between ll. 18 and 19, add:

p. 711, l. 2: For ‘be more deadly’ read ‘seem more deadly’.

p. 716, add entry:

pp. 716–17, note for 1090 (III: 371) 3009 Gandalf and Aragorn . . . : In the first edition of The Lord of the Rings the sentence ‘Elrond sends for Arwen . . . becoming dangerous’ was a separate entry in the Tale of Years, under the date 3016. It became conjoined with the entry for 3009 in the Ballantine Books edition of 1965, and thus entered the Allen & Unwin second edition, which used the Ballantine setting for the Appendices as its copy-text, Tolkien’s original revisions for the Appendices having been lost. Christopher Tolkien agrees with us that this was most likely an error in the Ballantine text, rather than an amendment by his father, and that it was overlooked as an error when his father worked over the Appendices for Allen & Unwin.

p. 719, l. 18 from bottom: The closing parenthesis and full stop of ‘(1965).’ should not be boldfaced.

p. 723, add as the first notes on the page:

p. 723, l. 1 from bottom [REVISED]: A letter by Tolkien to Rayner Unwin dated 12 May 1955, not preserved in the Allen & Unwin archive but which has surfaced at auction, confirms that the Boffin and Bolger family trees were omitted for lack of space; in the earlier text of this addendum, we had said only that this was ‘evidently’ true. The text of the Appendices runs almost to the end of the final page of the final gathering of the volume, with barely more than an inch of blank space remaining, and publication of The Return of the King was already delayed, with copies urgently wanted. If the Bolger and Boffin family trees had been included in the original edition, either Tolkien would have had to reduce the text by two pages, no doubt a difficult proposition under the press of time, or Allen & Unwin would have had to allow an extra gathering, which may not have been possible (for economic or practical reasons, or both), as it does not seem to have been considered.

In his letter of 12 May, Tolkien commented that he was influenced in his choice of material to include or discard by letters he had received and by the requests of critics such as W.H. Auden, P.H. Newby, and Hugh Brogan. The result, Tolkien felt, was too much material (given limitations of space), but also too little (to satisfy readers wanting ‘lore’). He thought it particularly important to include The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen and, in Appendix E, the tables for the Angerthas and Tengwar. It was his choice to omit the two family trees; and if more space was needed, he would have discarded the second part of Appendix F, ‘On Translation’, about which he had second thoughts. Nonetheless, he was still sorry that the ‘Book of Mazarbul’ ‘facsimiles’ could not be included (see note for p. 323), and that there were no lists of names which would have given him the opportunity to provide some Elvish vocabulary.

pp. 723–4, note on the Bolger and Boffin family trees [REVISED]: HarperCollins set these from uncorrected proofs made for (but omitted from) the first edition, rather than from Christopher Tolkien's family tables in The Peoples of Middle-earth, and never showed their new setting of the trees or tables to us for proofreading, due to a tight production schedule. Larry Kuenning has pointed out to us that the date of Odovacar Bolger (father of Fredegar) is given in the anniversary Lord of the Rings as 1336, but in Peoples as 1335. We have examined the Lord of the Rings papers at Marquette, and find that Tolkien wrote ‘1335’ in both holograph copies of the Bolger family tree, but altered the date to ‘1336’ in one of three copies of a galley proof. Because he did so, we are inclined to keep ‘1336’ in the published family tree, but because he did not do so in two copies of the galley, we feel, and Christopher Tolkien agrees, that it must remain an open question whether 1335 or 1336 is correct.

p. 724, ll. 21–3: Tolkien noted in one of his check copies of The Lord of the Rings that he had told a correspondent in 1965: ‘I believe he [Meriadoc] married a sister of Fredegar Bolger of the Bolgers of Budgeford’ (The Peoples of Middle-earth, p. 117).

p. 724, l. 8 from bottom: For ‘Gorbaduc’ read ‘Gorbadoc’.

p. 724, ll. 1–5 from bottom: We have been reminded that Fíriel, a daughter of Elanor (daughter of Samwise), is mentioned in note 2 to the preface to The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962). Her name, Tolkien says, if connected with the poem Fíriel, ‘must be derived from it; it could not have arisen in Westmarch’.

p. 739: Add before sub-section ‘On Translation’:

p. 747, l. 22: For ‘possesses’ read ‘possessed’.

p. 806, ll. 21–2: For ‘ŋ is used for ng in sing’ read ‘ŋ is used for ng in sing’.

p. 832, col. 1, index entry for Aman, l. 5: For ‘175’ read ‘176’.

p. 833, col. 1, index entry for Anórien, l. 4: For ‘541’ read ‘542’.

p. 840, col. 2, index entry for Bruinen (Loudwater), l. 2: For ’15, 171’ read ‘171’.

p. 840, col. 2, index entry for Buckland: Add: ‘name 57–8’.

p. 847, col. 2: Add index entry: ‘East, vs West, enemies from 16, 367, 402, 409, 466, 481, 483, 520, 569–70, 639’.

p. 850, col. 1: To the index entry Elves add: ‘need not count the running years 346’.

p. 860, col. 2: Reverse in order the index entries for Haradrim (Swarthy Men) and Haradrim (Southrons).

p. 863, col. 2: For ‘Immortality see Mortality’ read ‘Immortality see Elves’. We have no index entry for ‘Mortality’.

p. 863, col. 2, index entry for Imrahil, l. 1: For ‘285’ read ‘485’.

p. 871, col. 1, index entry for Moon(s), l. 6: For ‘26’ read ‘261’.

p. 875, col. 2: Add cross-reference: ‘Orion see Menelvagor’.

p. 878, col. 2: To the entry ‘Religion and religious observances . . .’, sub-entry ‘Tolkien rejects criticism that LR contains no religion’, add the citation 179–80.

p. 886, col. 2, index entry for Switzerland, l. 3: For ‘202’ read ‘203’.

p. 888, col. 1: Move index entry for Three-Farthing Stone to follow that for Thrawn.

p. 892, col. 1, l. 2: For ‘281’ read ‘381’.

p. 892, col. 1: Add cross-reference: ‘Waybread see Lembas’.

p. 893, col. 1, index entry for Wind, add: ‘and Amon Sûl 169; and Tarmenel 216; the West Wind 362’.