The grand designer was mortal after all

A while back, I tore through a series of books I never expected to read, and they revealed some­thing breath­taking about where The Good Stuff comes from.

The His­tory of The Lord of the Rings sounds like it might be a nerdy diegetic ref­er­ence work, some­thing from Elrond’s library. Oh, it’s far nerdier than that:

These books present J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings at many stages of its development, from jotted notes to pub­lished text, with exten­sive com­men­tary from Christo­pher Tolkien, the son who became THE great scholar of his father’s work. It is Christo­pher Tolkien who brought The Sil­mar­il­lion into the world, along with many more, but/and, it’s this series — this dialogue — that feels to me like his great achievement.

My most recent reread of The Lord of the Rings turned into a very tech­nical engagement, really inspecting the welds, which led me to The His­tory of The Lord of the Rings, and I feel lucky that it did, because these books have been a revelation.

The heart of it is this:

Tolkien, for all his vaunted designs, only got to The Good Stuff when he was IN it, really working the text. He could not world­build his way into a work­able story; he had to muddle and dis­cover and revise, just like the rest of us.

Here is the example that took my breath away.

Early in the pub­lished ver­sion of The Lord of the Rings (hereafter, LOTR) we learn about the inscrip­tion on the One Ring, which pro­vides the whole engine of the plot:

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

Those lines are inscribed on the ring in the Tengwar script, which is repro­duced in the book’s pages, fantastic:

We learn from Gan­dalf that these let­ters do not rep­re­sent any lan­guage of the elves, but rather the Black Speech of Mordor.

All of this is SUPER cool. In a single stroke, we get: a mythic backstory, a grand MacGuffin, a sense of lan­guage and history, the sub­limely sat­is­fying train of magic numbers — three … seven … nine … ONE! — plus some­thing graph­i­cally weird and beau­tiful on the page.

It’s all just tremendous — the per­fect kernel of Tolkien’s appeal.

And, guess what:

Not only was the inscrip­tion missing from the early drafts of LOTR … the whole logic of the ring was missing, too. In its place was a mess. The ring pos­sessed by Bilbo Bag­gins was one of thou­sands the Dark Lord manufactured, all basi­cally equivalent: they made their wearers invisible, and even­tu­ally claimed their souls. They were like cursed can­dies scat­tered by Sauron across Middle-earth.

Tolkien’s expla­na­tion of this, in his first draft, is about as com­pelling as what I just wrote.

It’s fine, as far as it goes; he could have made it work, prob­ably? Possibly? But it is not COOL in the way that the final for­mu­la­tion is COOL. It has none of the symmetry, the inevitability. It does only the work it has to do, and nothing else. It is not yet aes­thet­i­cally irresistible.

There are sev­eral revised approaches to “what’s the deal with the ring?” pre­sented in The His­tory of The Lord of the Rings, and, as you read through the drafts, the mate­rial just … slowly gets better! Bit by bit, the familiar angles emerge. There seems not to have been any magic moment: no elec­tric thought in the bathtub, circa 1931, that sent Tolkien rushing to find a pen.

It was just revision.

I find this totally inspiring.

You have to understand: Tolkien, among writers of this kind, is revered as THE grand designer. The story goes: he’d worked it all out in advance — invented these amazing lan­guages, plotted out this sprawling leg­en­darium — so, when he sat down to begin LOTR, it was all there to draw upon.

This is tech­nically true — he HAD worked out the lan­guages and leg­en­darium years before — but (I have now learned) that story doesn’t cap­ture or explain, in any way at all really, the process of com­posing these books. It doesn’t tell us how Tolkien came up with the things that actu­ally made them good.

The One Ring is only one example among many; they are thick on the page. Aragorn, son of Arathorn, was missing entirely from early drafts. In his place was a ranger hobbit with wooden feet named Trotter.

Ranger hobbit. Wooden feet. Trotter.

And a char­acter as indelible as Galadriel — think of her pow­erful pre­siding role — walked not out of the leg­en­darium, but an errant note:

There is then a sentence, placed within brackets, which is unhappily — since it is prob­ably the first ref­er­ence my father ever made to Galadriel — only in part decipherable: “[?Lord] of Gal­adrim [?and ?a] Lady and … [?went] to White Council.”

Tolkien dis­covered her on the page, just as we did.

The analogy is clear, and hugely heartening: if Tolkien can find his way to the One Ring in the middle of the fifth draft, so can I, and so can you.

There’s a sec­tion where Christo­pher Tolkien repro­duces the var­ious pasted-together iter­a­tions of his father’s first map of Middle-earth:

Not even the MAP was mapped out in advance!

I cannot rec­om­mend The His­tory of The Lord of the Rings to everyone, or even to most people. It is really very dense. But … IF you have read and enjoyed the books … and IF you find this kind of in-the-workshop analysis engaging … then you MIGHT find them as cap­ti­vating as I have.

(Note that there exists a 12-volume series titled The His­tory of Middle-earth, con­taining too much gristle even for me. What you want is the subset pho­tographed above: The His­tory of The Lord of the Rings.)

First published:  October 2023
Last updated: December 2024