Reader’s Companion Addenda & Corrigenda
During the college winter break, we’ve been working to catch up with addenda and corrigenda to our books. For some titles, it has been an entire year today since we posted additions, changes, or corrections – far too long – and although we might hope for a time when our texts are perfect, with Tolkien there’s always something more to say.
This is particularly true for our Companion and Guide, so we’ll be a while yet preparing pages for the Chronology and Reader’s Guide. Today, though, we’re able to mount updated pages for the 2005 (first) and 2008 (first revised) editions of The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion – our book of annotations to The Lord of the Rings – and a new page for the second revised edition published this past year. We hope our readers will find these helpful.
With the 2014 edition, the Reader’s Companion was brought back into hardcover by HarperCollins (in the United States, Houghton Mifflin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have published only the original, unrevised hardcover edition since 2005). We had been able to include a few additions and corrections in the HarperCollins trade paperback of 2008, and for 2014 were asked to make further revisions. Severe pressures of time, however, which included Wayne reconstructing 150 printed pages when the original electronic typesetting file proved unavailable, made it essential that we refrain as much as possible from adding pages or introducing new page breaks, so that we would not have to substantially revise spacing or change page references in the index. Therefore, for the most part, we limited ourselves to corrections and brief additions that would fit within the existing text or in blank spaces at the ends of chapters. Only in a few instances, where we felt it most important to expand our text (in reply to comments and questions we had received), did we lightly alter page breaks, and thus a handful of index entries, still without increasing the overall number of pages.
Image: Cover of the 2014 edition of The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion.
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Too Many Books and Never Enough 
As always, THANK YOU for your precise & scholarly work on all things Tolkien!
Question: While working on your 2nd Revised (Hardback) edition, was there any information that you chose to delete, for lack of space, to make room for something more important, since all your pagination needed to remain exactly the same? In other words, will there be times I might want to also refer to my 1st edition hardback for extra information that was (regretfully but needfully) lost in the updating process?
In the sense you mean, we’ve never deleted information. We have, though, as we indicate in our Addenda and Corrigenda, occasionally removed errors or revised our wording to make a correction. But all valid information is still there. Sometimes, when we’ve added something to a page but needed to retain a page break, we’ve slightly adjusted the spacing between entries, or had the advantage of an extra blank line to work with, or to gain a line we’ve slightly altered our wording (with no change of meaning) to make it more economical.
Thank you! Then I’ll simply stick to your new 2nd Edition Hardback and not bother with the 1st edition, while referring to your always superb online Addenda/Corrigenda. Please keep up the EXCELLENT work!
Also: I’m extremely excited about your “Art of LotR” follow-up to the “Art of the Hobbit”, which itself was amazing! I’m already saving up funding to purchase that as soon as it’s available! Your “Art of the Hobbit” was a HUGE boon for teaching “The Hobbit” to my 6th graders in California (thanks to the technological advances of document cameras & video projectors)….They LOVED seeing things EXACTLY how Tolkien envisioned them, rather than letting a 3rd party tweak the story with their own interpretations (though Alan Lee’s art is beautiful, it’s sometimes quite different from the visualization within kids’ heads while they read…..While, an author’s own art (in this case, Tolkien’s) always carries an extra weight of authoritativeness to it that kids readily respect!)