Constructing The Lord of the Rings

A "long and difficult process"

Persuaded by his publishers, Tolkien started "a new Hobbit" in December 1937. Nick Groom comments that he had "little sense of plot or character, direction or development, meaning or significance" to guide him through the "long and difficult process". Writing was slow, because Tolkien had a full-time academic position, marked exams to bring in a little extra income, and wrote many drafts.

Tolkien abandoned the novel for most of 1943 and only restarted it in April 1944, as a serial for his son Christopher Tolkien, who was sent chapters as they were written while he was serving in South Africa with the Royal Air Force. Tolkien made another major effort in 1946, and showed the manuscript to his publishers in 1947. The story was effectively finished the next year, but Tolkien did not complete the revision of earlier parts of the work until 1949. The original manuscripts, which total 9,250 pages, now reside in the J. R. R. Tolkien Collection at Marquette University.

Getting started

As documented in The Return of the Shadow, Tolkien had written a five-page draft, what he called the "first germ" of The Lord of the Rings, by 19 December 1937 when he claimed to his publisher "I have written the first chapter of a new story about Hobbits – 'A long expected party'." He completed a fourth, much fuller, draft of the chapter by 1 February 1938, offering it to the publisher Stanley Unwin, for his son, the 12-year old Rayner Unwin to read. It was Rayner who had recommended that The Hobbit should be published.

By 4 March 1938, in another letter to his publisher, he had written drafts of three chapters, 1:1 "A Long-expected Party", 1:3 "Three's Company and Four's More" (the last three words later dropped), and 1:4 "To Maggot's Farm and Buckland" (which became "A Short Cut to Mushrooms"). In the letter he stated that the story had "taken an unpremeditated turn"; Christopher Tolkien identifies this confidently as the intrusion of Black Riders into the tale. The idea for the first chapter arrived fully formed, although the reasons behind Bilbo's disappearance, the significance of the Ring, and the title The Lord of the Rings did not come until the spring of 1938. Originally, Tolkien had planned to write a story in which Bilbo had used up all his treasure and was looking for another adventure to gain more, but gradually both the story and the protagonists changed. Still, the work was at this stage almost completely ad hoc: the Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey comments that "what is bound to surprise anyone familiar with The Lord of the Rings who then reads Tolkien's early drafts in The Return of the Shadow is quite how little Tolkien had in the way of a plan, or even of a conception."

Hesitant progress

Tolkien at last, in David Bratman's words, "got a small band of hobbits on the road and into a series of picaresque adventures that enlarged in wordage, complexity, seriousness, and significance as fast as he could write". The way the story kept on getting more complicated led Tolkien to ask himself a rising tide of questions about the key themes of the story, especially the nature of Bilbo's Ring, but also issues like what part the other Rings should play, who Trotter was, and whether Bingo/Frodo should have Sam Gamgee as a companion. The outcome was a fresh (fifth) version, a new second chapter, "Ancient History", which became "The Shadow of the Past", and the Ring Verse. The rearrangement of the narrative brought Tolkien to the realisation that he needed an exact chronology to ensure that characters could act and meet at the right moments.

In August 1939, Tolkien wrote an outline of the novel from Rivendell to the destruction of the Ring and the "Dark Tower". The journey was to be by way of the Misty Mountains in a snowstorm, Tree Beard's forest, Moria, and the siege of Ond (Gondor). Groom notes that Isengard, Lothlórien, Rohan, Ithilien, and Cirith Ungol were not among the places visited, and that the three major battles do not feature. In his first draft of Book 2, Tolkien's plan suggests that Gandalf will fight with a Black Rider (not a Balrog) in Moria, but he already knows that the wizard has to return after falling into the abyss; he notes "probably fall is not as deep as it seemed."

In his foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien states that in 1940, despite the war, "I plodded on [with writing], mostly by night, till I stood by Balin's tomb in Moria." He then paused for nearly a year, restarting "and so came to Lothlorien and the Great River late in 1941." In 1942, Tolkien made his first drafts of what became 5:1 "Minas Tirith" and 5:3 "The Muster of Rohan". He then broke off, not knowing where to take the story next: "and there as the beacons flared in Anórien and Théoden came to Harrowdale I stopped. Foresight had failed and there was no time for thought."

He returned to the novel in April 1944, working especially on what became "The Shadow of the Past", introducing the "fallen wizard" Saruman, and what Groom calls "in one daring step forward" creating the other exceptionally long chapter, "The Council of Elrond". Another major addition was the Balrog, described in a carefully ambiguous, "beautifully equivocal" way to create a monstrous inhuman presence. Tolkien then planned the remainder of the novel in more detail, to span Lothlórien, Boromir's attempt to get the Ring from Frodo; Frodo's escape; Gollum being captured by Frodo, guiding him and Sam across the Dead Marshes; and betraying them to Shelob. Meanwhile, the other characters are to be involved in battles. Drafting the Lothlórien episode, Tolkien realised that its fate, and that of Galadriel who has an Elven-ring, is tied to that of the Ring. In short, the plot was tightening.

In what became chapter 3:6 "The King of the Golden Hall", Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli are greeted at Edoras, the Anglo-Saxon-style hall of King Théoden of Rohan, by a process of challenges by the guards, derived directly from Beowulf; an early version has the guards actually speaking Old English lines from the poem.

Getting into a fix

Tolkien was dissatisfied with the second half of Book 3, such as 3:7 the battle of Helm's Deep, the drowning of Isengard in 3:9 "Flotsam and Jetsam", and the dialogue in 3:10 "The Voice of Saruman" at the tower of Orthanc, and radically rewrote them. He took around a year to work out what he was going to do with the Palantír, revising the section repeatedly. At the same time,Tolkien was struggling with the narrative of Book 4, writing multiple versions of 4:2 "The Passage of the Marshes", which as he said in a letter were "a few pages for a lot of sweat." Groom comments that "the wanderings of Frodo and Sam mirror Tolkien's writing process: frustratingly slow progress, retracing steps and going around in circles, and pursued by an obscure malice from another, earlier story."

But with Gollum more and more tightly tied to the Ring, Tolkien elaborated his character and split personality, making him talk to himself, in Tolkien's words "a sort of good Smeagol angry with a bad Gollum", and becoming a guide rather than a predator. Gergely Nagy comments that the "most peculiar" character of Gollum, as seen especially in his idiolectic use of language, was achieved only through extensive rewriting: "Gollum initially spoke much more coherently and logically, so that the contrast was much less striking between his two schizophrenic selves". Tolkien was unsure, too, about choice of antagonist on the approach to Mordor; he toyed with having many giant spiders, as in The Hobbit, or just one, the ancient and powerful Ungoliant, who as Groom comments was "Morgoth's fearsome ally from The Silmarillion (and considerably more powerful than a Balrog) – before settling on Shelob."

As the story progressed, Tolkien brought in elements from The Silmarillion mythology to create an impression of depth, such as when Sam mentions a Silmaril and [Morgoth's] "Iron Crown in Thangorodrim". Taking up the story again in 1946, Tolkien reworked much of Book 5, having Éowyn fatally injured when she kills the Witch-King, while Gondor's army takes the war into Mordor itself.

As documented in Sauron Defeated, Tolkien first sketched the destruction of the Ring in the fires of Mount Doom in 1939. but the story of how the Ring came to fall into the Crack was still unclear in 1941. The first draft of chapter 6:1 "The Tower of Kirith Ungol" reached the moment when Sam sees two orcs shot with arrows; it was close to its final form. The second draft adds Sam's temptation by the Ring. Tolkien drafted the orcs' capture of Frodo in 1944, which he described in a letter as "hav[ing] got the hero into such a fix that not even an author will be able to extricate him without labour and difficulty"; he did not work out his escape until 1947. Tolkien completed the chapter in a third draft.

Finally attaining fluency

Tolkien stated in a note to a letter that the 3:4 "Treebeard" chapter "was written off more or less as it stands... almost like reading some one else's work." The chapter seemed almost, in Christopher Tolkien's words, to "write itself". 6:2 "The Land of Shadow" was likewise drafted "swiftly and in a single burst of writing". 6:3 "Mount Doom" was drafted in the same manuscript, directly without any preceding rough sketches; Christopher Tolkien suggests that his father's "long thought" about the destruction of the Ring allowed him to write the chapter "more quickly and surely than almost any earlier chapter". The drafts 6:4 "The Field of Kormallen" (later "The Field of Cormallen") and 6:5 "The Steward and the King" (initially untitled, then "Faramir and Éowyn") similarly reached almost final form in a single stage. 6:6 "Many Partings" was first drafted in the same manuscript as the previous chapter, but in a "remarkably brief and spare" form, later extended by inserting new materials. This was followed by a fair copy and then in final form "in my father's most handsome script".

6:7 "Homeward Bound" was seemingly drafted rapidly "in one long burst", along with part of the next chapter, 6.8 "The Scouring of the Shire". Initially Gandalf accompanied the hobbits to the gate to the Shire, and the story was very far from the chapter's final form. 6.9 "The Grey Havens" was first drafted in the same long manuscript as the previous two chapters. That text, as far as it went, survived largely unchanged, but several details were added, such as mentions of Fredegar Bolger, of Frodo's first illness, and of Merry and Pippin's fine clothing.

Tolkien initially drafted an epilogue about Sam Gamgee, Rosie Cotton, and their family, but it was cut from the final text of the novel. It was to have been accompanied by a facsimile of a letter from King Aragorn, in English and Sindarin, both written out in Tengwar script. The first draft of the epilogue ended with the sentence "They went in, and Sam shut the door. But even as he did so, he heard suddenly, deep and unstilled, the sigh and murmur of the Sea upon the shores of middle-earth".

Tolkien's methods

Tolkien's writing methods included the use of non-narrative materials including maps, names, languages, and drawings to develop ideas and guide the text.

Maps

In a letter to the novelist Naomi Mitchison, Tolkien explained that he drew maps to guide his storytelling:

I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit (generally with meticulous care for distances). The other way about lands one in confusions and impossibilities, and in any case it is weary work to compose a map from a story — as I fear you have found.

Tolkien's working maps evolved continuously as the story developed. His "First Map" had seen many modifications by the time his son Christopher redrew it as "a large elaborate map in pencil and coloured chalks" in 1943.

Shippey notes Tolkien's discussion of "inspiration" and "mere uninspired 'invention'" in his essay "On Fairy-Stories", based on a 1939 lecture. Shippey comments that Tolkien does not appear to have begun with "a flash of 'inspiration'", rather the reverse: he began with a substantial amount of effort on practical materials like maps, and eventually inspiration followed. In his words "Maps, names and languages came before plot. Elaborating them was in a sense Tolkien's way of building up enough steam to get rolling; but they had also in a sense provided the motive to want to."

Names

The protagonists that Tolkien had brought to Buckland by 1938 were Bingo (Bilbo's "nephew", later named Frodo); Frodo; and Odo; these names came from Tolkien's 1934 poem "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil", along with Vigo and Marmaduke. Groom comments that "the names were very fluid" throughout the process of construction. Christopher Tolkien remarks that "It is characteristic that while the dramatis personae are not the same, and the story possesses as yet none of the dimension, the gravity, and the sense of vast danger, imparted by [1:2 "The Shadow of the Past"], a good part of 'Three is Company' was already in being". He adds that his father took "delight in the names and relations of the hobbit-families", and that "in no respect did [he] chop and change more copiously", noting among others Angelica and Semolina Baggins, Caramella Bolger, Marmaduke Brandybuck, Gorbaduc > Orlando Grubb, "Amalda > Lonicera or Griselda > Grimalda > Lobelia [Sackville-Baggins]".

Chapter 1:10 "Strider", at first untitled, had the hobbit protagonists in Barnabas Butterbur's inn at Bree meeting a person described in Gandalf's letter as "a ranger (wild hobbit) known as Trotter", since he wears wooden shoes that clatter. Trotter the wild hobbit is later "dramatically" replaced by a man, Ingold, Elfstone and, eventually, Aragorn. Shippey comments that Tolkien "stuck determinedly to the increasingly inapposite name 'Trotter'" even when "the character had become fixed as the tall and long-legged Aragorn". He criticises the [Aragorn] speech "But Trotter shall be the name of my house, if ever that be established, yet perhaps in the same high tongue it shall not sound so ill". Shippey writes that Tolkien was simply wrong here, observing that "trot" is "quite inconsonant with dignity when applied to a tall man" and stating that Tolkien "should have dropped the idea much earlier". He notes, too, that the speech defending an ill-sounding name survived into the final text, as Aragorn defends the name "Strider", making it the name of his royal line, the house of Telcontar in the "high tongue", Sindarin.

Names, too, could suggest structure and content. Shippey comments that from the most basic of names in The Hobbit, like "The Hill" and "The Water", Tolkien moved on to experiment with the use of real English placenames like "Worminghall" in Farmer Giles of Ham, playing with its imagined etymology. For The Lord of the Rings, Shippey writes that the name Farthinghoe, a village not far from Tolkien's home in Oxford, "set Tolkien thinking about the Farthings of 'The Shire'."

Languages

Tolkien's narrative was also at least partly founded on languages, both real (he was a philologist) and invented. He stated in a letter that his Middle-earth writings were "largely an essay in linguistic aesthetic". Shippey argues that although this may seem wild, there is evidence for it. In the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien explains that he chose Bree placenames such as Chetwood, and Bree itself, to give a feeling of unfamiliarity or vague Celticness.

Shippey calls the effect of Bilbo's song of Eärendil "highly Keatsian". Tolkien has Gildor's Elves sing in his invented language of Quenya in the woods of the Shire; he describes the effect the singing has on the listening hobbits. Shippey comments that Tolkien believed, more or less heretically "that untranslated elvish would do a job that English could not". Gandalf chants the Ring Verse in the Black Speech, another of his invented languages, creating a dramatically terrifying effect on his listeners. As another example, Shippey remarks Sam Gamgee's aesthetic response to Gimli's song of the Dwarf-King Durin as he hears "the ring of elvish and dwarvish names. 'I like that!' said Sam. 'I should like to learn it. In Moria, in Khazad-Dum!'". Shippey comments that "obviously his response is a model one".

Drawings

As Tolkien developed details of his plot, he made drawings of many of the locations involved; and as his ideas developed, so both drawings and text were updated until he felt the descriptions were correct. For example, his conception of the tower of Orthanc at the centre of the ring of Isengard, for 3:8 "The Road to Isengard" and 3:10 "The Voice of Saruman", evolved considerably while he was writing. In the earliest versions, the tower was round, rising in multiple tiers, and had three small horns on its top. Then it was to stand on a cloven hill, with a round arch supporting the weight of the tower. Finally in drawing 5, the tower was composed entirely of four tall narrow almost pyramidal horns, seemingly of bedrock not masonry, arranged to form a square, and rising straight from level ground.