AKICILJ: LotR second edition changes

[kate_nepveu]

Is there anywhere an easily-accessible description of what substantive changes Tolkien made to the text of Lord of the Rings between the first and second editions?

Also, if you wanted to recommend any works of criticism regarding LotR (other than what's on this list and Shippey's Road to Middle-earth), now would be a fine time. (LotR: A Reader's Companion, by Hammond and Scull, looked good in theory but reading the sample online at Amazon, err, not so much.)

Comments

[calimac.livejournal.com]

It's not quite as simple as the changes between editions in The Hobbit (which are detailed in The Annotated Hobbit by Douglas A. Anderson), because the UK edition and the US hardcover and paperback each went off on their own track and weren't put back together again for over 20 years, and except for replacing the author's foreword, most of the changes were very small; there was much less changed than in The Hobbit.

Most of the major changes are discussed in Hammond & Scull's LotR: A Reader's Companion, though they aren't separated out from other matters. (May I ask what you found deficient about this book? It's not intended as a work of criticism, but as the annotations for a hypothetical Annotated LotR.)

The changes are listed in full in Hammond's J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography, but in crabbed and hard-to-decipher detail. Also that book is not easily available and is very expensive, though some academic libraries have it.

There is one article that I know of discussing the artistic effect of those changes, and it is by, er, me. It was published in a book called The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, from Marquette University Press and edited, once again, by Hammond and Scull. I think it's a good book with a lot of interesting articles, but if you just want that one, I could provide an electronic copy. (Don't tell anyone, but I could also supply some photocopies from the Hammond bibliography.)

[kate_nepveu]

Re: _Reader's Companion_: just that it is annotations, not criticism, and a couple descriptions had suggested otherwise.

If you don't mind, I'd love a copy of your article. I might be able to get Chad to ILL the book for me from another college, but in the meantime I'm quite curious about the changes.