Christmas Addenda

We have just posted to our website further addenda and corrigenda to The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide (the work as a whole, and separately for the Chronology and Reader’s Guide), to The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion, and to the 50th anniversary edition of The Lord of the Rings. We should have published another group of entries (since those of last March) already during the summer, but as more information came to hand, we kept thinking that we would write just one more note, and suddenly had nineteen pages of complicated Word copy to divide among eleven web pages – more than that, in fact, as we had to hold back some material while waiting for permission to quote from unpublished letters.

Although we still find, or are told about, the odd error, lately we have been writing more additions than corrections. We need to catch up more thoroughly with Tolkien literature published since we sent the Companion and Guide to press in 2006, as well as with some materials that appeared prior to that date, so that our book – augmented online – is as comprehensive as possible. We also take note of additional letters by Tolkien that appear in the market – carefully distinguishing genuine articles from the many forgeries now infesting eBay – and continue to examine libraries and archives when opportunities allow.

For our latest Companion and Guide update, besides addenda and corrigenda, we felt that we should provide a bibliography of the many sources we have cited online, as a supplement to our list of ‘Works Consulted’ in the Chronology and Reader’s Guide. Also, Wayne took the opportunity to improve the standard of the CSS and XHTML coding ‘under the hood’ of our web pages, and to tweak their appearance.

Our thanks go to all who wrote such kind messages in response to ‘Fifteen Years’, and to all who read these words, our best wishes for Christmas and the new year.