TOLKIEN, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. I. The Fellowship of the Ring; II. The Two Towers; III. The Return of the King. Revised Edition. London: George Allen & Unwin. 1966.
Three volumes, 8vo. Original red cloth lettered in gilt to spines (titles in ornamented roundels), top edges stained red, in the grey-green dustwrappers lettered black and white, with “Ring and Eye” device in black, red and gold to front panels; fold-out maps printed black and red, of Middle-earth (Vol. I & II) and of Rohan, Gondor, and Mordor (Vol. III) tipped to recto of rear free endpapers; pp. I: [iv], 424, [map]; II: 352, [map]; III: [5]–440, [map]; the merest rubbing to spine tips; otherwise, fine copies in fine wrappers, presenting as unused.
An exceptionally bright, fresh set of the first printings of the Second, Revised Edition of Tolkien’s masterpiece, with an extended Prologue, notes, and index of persons and places.
Following the success of The Hobbit (1937), Tolkien was urged by his publisher and readers alike to produce a sequel. The scale of The Lord of the Rings, however, was not what either had in mind, taking a full twelve years to complete (“my work has escaped from my control, and I have produced a monster”) and a further six to reach the press. In the Foreword for this second, revised edition, Tolkien writes that it “grew in the telling until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history that preceded it. It was begun soon after The Hobbit was written and before its publication in 1937 […]”.
The editions of both works published in the mid 1960s – the Third of The Hobbit and this Second of The Lord of the Rings – represent the author’s final revisions, aligning them even more closely as parts of the monumental legendarium he had brought into being. Tolkien was pressed to produce new editions so that American copyright protection could be secured without question (the United States were not yet part of the international copyright convention). A new Ballantine US paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings, with Tolkien’s revisions, was issued in October 1965, this UK edition in cloth following in 1966. In the new Foreword, Tolkien writes that “the opportunity has been taken of revising [the work]. A number of errors and inconsistencies that still remained in the text have been corrected, and an attempt has been made to provide information on a few points which attentive readers have raised”. In addition to his Foreword, Tolkien provides “an addition to the Prologue, some notes, and an index of the names of persons and places”.
If early critical reception was muted, the work (and it is a work, rather than a trilogy) soon assumed classic status. An epic on a scale unseen in English since Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and one of the most loved (and indeed read) works of twentieth-century literature in English, C. S. Lewis went as far as to assert that “If Ariosto rivalled it in invention (in fact he does not) he would still lack its heroic seriousness. No imaginary world has been projected which is at once multifarious and so true to its own inner laws; none so seemingly objective, so disinfected from the taint of an author's merely individual psychology; none so relevant to the actual human situation yet so free from allegory. And what fine shading there is in the variations of style to meet the almost endless diversity of scenes and characters- comic, homely, epic, monstrous, or diabolic.”
See Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977).
Hammond A5e.
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