+ Summary Timeline Date Events Late 1937 Starts writing Dec 1939 Pauses Aug 1940 Restarts 1941 Pauses 1942 Restarts 1943 Pauses Apr 1944 Rewrites first chapters 1945 Pauses 1946 Reworks Book 5 1948 Writes Book 6 1949 Revises earlier Books 1954 Vols I and II printed 1955 Writes Appendices Oct 1955 Vol III printed
The task of constructing The Lord of the Rings was long and complex, lasting from its start in 1937, soon after the success of J. R. R. Tolkien's children's book The Hobbit, until the novel's publication in 1954–1955. Tolkien began with no idea where the story would go, and made several false starts before the tale of the One Ring emerged. The names of the characters, including the protagonists, of The Lord of the Rings changed many times. Tolkien stopped writing repeatedly, sometimes for years at a time. Inspiration, when it came, was based on practical work with maps, names, and languages that Tolkien incorporated in the novel. He illustrated places described in the text, updating drawings and text together until he felt they were correct.
Context
The request for a sequel to the 1937 children's book The Hobbit prompted J. R. R. Tolkien to begin what became his most famous work: the epic novel The Lord of the Rings (first published in three volumes in 1954–1955). He eventually spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and appendices for the novel, during which time he received the constant support of the Inklings, in particular his closest friend C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set against the background of The Silmarillion, but in a time long after it.
Tolkien at first intended The Lord of the Rings to be a children's tale in the style of The Hobbit, but it quickly grew darker and more serious in the writing. Though a direct sequel to The Hobbit, it addressed an older audience, drawing on the immense backstory of Beleriand that Tolkien had constructed in previous years, and which eventually saw posthumous publication in The Silmarillion and other volumes. Tolkien strongly influenced the fantasy genre that grew after the book's success.
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. He offered 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 second quarter 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.
+ Final structure Volumes(chosen by publisher) Books(titles were dropped) I: The Fellowship of the Ring 1. The Ring Sets Out2. The Ring Goes South II: The Two Towers 3. The Treason of Isengard4. The Ring Goes East III: The Return of the King 5. The War of the Ring6. The End of the Third Age
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".