J. R. R. Tolkien used frame stories throughout his Middle-earth writings, especially his legendarium, to make the works resemble a genuine mythology written and edited by many hands over a long period of time. He described in detail how his fictional characters wrote their books and transmitted them to others, and showed how later in-universe editors annotated the material.
The frame story for both Tolkien's novels published in his lifetime, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, is that the eponymous Hobbit Bilbo Baggins wrote a memoir of his adventures; it became The Red Book of Westmarch. This was continued by his relative Frodo Baggins, who carried the One Ring to Mount Doom, and then by Frodo's servant, Samwise Gamgee, who had accompanied him. The Lord of the Rings contains an appendix, "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen", which, being written by Men rather than Hobbits, has its own frame story.
The legendarium, the body of writing behind the posthumously-published The Silmarillion, has a frame story that evolved over Tolkien's long writing career. It centred on a character, Aelfwine the mariner, whose name, like those of several later reincarnations of the frame-characters, means "Elf-friend". He sails the seas and is shipwrecked on an island where the Elves narrate their tales to him. The legendarium contains two incomplete time-travel novels, The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers, which are framed by various "Elf-friend" characters who by dream or other means visit earlier ages, step by step all the way back to the ancient, Atlantis-like lost civilisation of Númenor.
Tolkien was influenced by William Morris's use of a frame story in his 1868–1870 epic poem The Earthly Paradise, in which mariners of Norway set sail for the mythical place, where they hear and narrate tales, one of them of a wanderer much like Eärendil. Tolkien was familiar, too, with the Celtic Imram sea-voyage legends such as those of St Brendan, who returned to tell many stories, and published a poem called "Imram" from his legendarium.
Eventually, Tolkien gave the book not just a frame story, but an elaborate editorial frame of prologue and appendices that together imply the survival of a manuscript through the thousands of years since the end of the Third Age, along with the editing and annotation of that manuscript by many hands. This placed Tolkien in the congenial role for a philologist of having to "translate" the ancient languages used in the manuscript.
Context
Frame stories
A frame story is a tale that encloses or frames the main story or set of stories. For example, in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein, the main story is framed by a fictional correspondence between an explorer and his sister; in One Thousand and One Nights, compiled during the Islamic Golden Age, the many stories are framed by a tale that Scheherazade keeps the king from executing her by telling him a story every night, each time not completing the story by daybreak so that he spares her life for just one more day.
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
Red Book of Westmarch
In the last chapter of The Hobbit, Tolkien writes of the protagonist and titular character Bilbo Baggins returning from the journey to the Lonely Mountain and composing his memoirs, to record the events described in the book. Bilbo thinks of calling his work There and Back Again, A Hobbit's Holiday., "The Last Stage" Tolkien's full name for the novel is indeed The Hobbit or There and Back Again., Title page In the first chapter of The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo's There and Back Again tale is said to be written in his red leather-bound diary., "A Long-expected Party" While living in Rivendell, Bilbo expands his memoirs into a record of the events of The Lord of the Rings, including the exploits of his kinsman Frodo Baggins and others. He leaves the material for Frodo to complete and organize. "Many Partings" Frodo writes down the bulk of the final work, using Bilbo's diary and "many pages of loose notes". At the close of Tolkien's main narrative, the work is almost complete, and Frodo leaves the task to his gardener and close friend and heir Samwise Gamgee., "The Grey Havens"
The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger writes that Tolkien, seeking to present his Middle-earth writings as a credible mythology, needed to create a "credible book tradition". He went to "elaborate lengths" to achieve this, including many mentions of Bilbo's "diary" and "Translations from the Elvish", supposedly created during his years of retirement, complete with "the masses of notes and paper in his room at Rivendell". She observes that the simulated tradition is already in evidence, hidden in plain sight, in The Hobbit, whose dust jacket is "surreptitiously" ornamented by Tolkien with ancient-looking runes, which read:
Flieger notes that The Hobbits frame story is rather fragile, since the book's narrator often speaks in a voice that cannot be Bilbo's. In The Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, Tolkien carefully embedded the frame story in the text, from the earliest drafts. He has Bilbo talk in the Council of Elrond about getting on with his book, saying that he was "just writing an ending for it", but realising that it now needed "several more chapters" because of Frodo's adventures on the way to Rivendell., "The Council of Elrond" She comments that Tolkien "went so far as to draw up a title page" for his Red Book, showing Bilbo's "largely unsatisfactory tries" at finding an appropriate title. The final title is Frodo's:
My Diary. My Unexpected Journey. There and Back Again. AndWhat Happened After. Adventures of Five Hobbits. The Tale of the Great Ring, compiled byBilbo Baggins from his own observations and the accounts of his friends.What we did in the War of the Ring.
THE DOWNFALL OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS AND THE RETURN OF THE KING
(as seen by the Little People; being the memoirs of Bilbo and Frodo of the Shire, supplemented by the accounts of their friends and the learning of the Wise.)
Together with extracts from Books of Lore translated by Bilboin Rivendell.
Flieger writes that at the time of the release of the first edition of The Lord of the Rings in 1954, Tolkien had not yet included that text in the Red Book; its prologue spoke of The Hobbit as containing "a selection from the Red Book of Westmarch". Tolkien went on developing the frame story, and in the second edition he added a "Note on the Shire Records" to the prologue. It explains, in the voice of the fictional editor, that the "account" (the main text of The Lord of the Rings) was taken mainly from the Red Book of Westmarch, stating that this was begun as "Bilbo's private diary", continued by Frodo with an account of the War of the Ring, and extended by Sam.
Near the end of the main text, Tolkien has Frodo give the Red Book to Sam. Flieger notes that, seeing it, Sam says "Why, you have nearly finished it, Mr. Frodo!", and describes Frodo's answer as "both definitive and revealing": I have quite finished, Sam', said Frodo. 'The last pages are for you. She comments that where Sam says "it", meaning the book, Frodo does not, leaving open whether he means the book or his life in Middle-earth as he has recorded in the book. She briefly considers what Sam might have been supposed to have added, if the suggestion is to be taken at all seriously. She points out that they could have been books 4 and 6 of The Lord of the Rings, where Frodo is never seen without Sam, but there are times when Sam is alert while Frodo is absent or unconscious. Further, no other observer was present, especially at Mount Doom where Sam is the only person who sees Gollum fighting an invisible Frodo for the Ring.
Flieger observes that on the stairs of the dangerous pass of Cirith Ungol, Frodo and Sam talk about what a story is. Sam says "We're in one, of course, but I mean put into words, you know ... read out of a great big book with red and black letters". Frodo answers "Why Sam ... to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story were already written". Flieger writes that this is "the most self-referential and post-modern moment in the entire book", since it constitutes the book itself looking both back at its own creation, and forward to the printed book that the reader is holding. She compares this with a passage that Tolkien certainly knew, lines 867–874 of Beowulf, where the scop who is reciting the poem sings of a poet singing about Beowulf. In her view, Sam's "put into words, you know" is a deliberate echo of Beowulfs "glorying in words".
+ Beowulf's self-referential account of Anglo-Saxon artistry in story-telling Beowulf 867–874 Roy Liuzza's translation At times the king's thane, full of grand stories, mindful of songs, who remembered much, a great many of the old tales, found other words truly bound together; he began again to recite with skill the adventure of Beowulf, adeptly tell an apt tale, and weave his words.
Peter Jackson chose to continue the use of the frame story of Bilbo's memoirs in his film adaptations. In his 2001 The Fellowship of the Ring, Bilbo's There and Back Again provided the basis for the voiceover for the scene "Concerning Hobbits"; this was greatly extended in the Special Extended Edition. The memoirs' title became the working title for the third of Jackson's The Hobbit Films in August 2012, but in 2014 he changed it to The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.
"The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen"
The Lord of the Rings contains a second frame story, for the appendix "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen". The tale describes how the hero Aragorn came to marry an immortal Elf-woman, Arwen. Tolkien stated that it was "really essential" to the work. Its frame story is that the tale was written by Faramir and Éowyn's grandson Barahir after Aragorn's death, and that an abbreviated version of the tale was included in a copy of the Thain's Book made by Findegil. This in turn was annotated, corrected, and extended in Minas Tirith., "Prologue: Note on the Shire Records" The narrative voice and the story's point of view are examined by the scholar Christine Barkley, who considers the main part of the tale to have been narrated by Aragorn.
Paratexts
Tolkien included a mass of paratexts – prefaces, notes, and appendices of all kinds – in The Lord of the Rings, and some in The Hobbit. The Tolkien scholar Janet Brennan Croft comments that these "resonat[e]" or "collaborat[e]" with the main text to amplify its effect, making it more believable. Several of these contribute to his frame stories, which place him not as author but as the last of a line of philological editors of ancient documents originally written by characters such as the Hobbits Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. These paratexts thus support a found manuscript conceit, which in turn supports the frame story. The Tolkien scholar Giuseppe Pezzini writes that the "meta-textual frame [of The Lord of the Rings] ... is duly harmonised in the text through the use of formal features; the appendixes are indeed full of scribal glosses, later notes, and editorial references that are meant to match the elaborate textual history detailed in the Note on the Shire Records." For example: