Publication Day (plus One)

Wayne writes: Yesterday, November 2nd, was the announced publication date for the new, three-volume edition of our J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide. We received an advance copy in September, so it has been printed; but we learned today that HarperCollins have had quality control issues regarding the boxed set, and must replace copies that weren’t acceptable. We don’t know yet how long the boxed set will be delayed, or if the copies to be sold as individual volumes – which were to be published on 30 November – will be delayed as well.

This is disappointing to us too. But shall we say that patience is a virtue? And in the meantime, Amazon U.K. (sorry, there’s no U.S. edition) are still taking orders for the boxed set at only £78, a savings of £42 off the list price. (The three individual volumes will sell for £40 each.) Though we say so as shouldn’t, we think that this is good value for money. Here are the figures.

The first edition (2006) of the Chronology volume ran to 996 pages, including genealogical and bibliographical appendices, a list of works consulted, and an index, while the first edition of the Reader’s Guide (omitting back matter also included in the Chronology) came to 1135 pages, thus effectively 2131 pages, plus a preface of 9 pages. For the new edition, 61 pages have been added to the Chronology proper, 320 to the Reader’s Guide proper, 20 to the appendices, 28 to the bibliography of works consulted, and 6 to the index. The preface is now 11 pages, and in the Reader’s Guide we added an 8-page list of the articles. That totals 445 additional pages, compared with our first edition.

Counting that in words, and referring only to the main portions of text, the Chronology has 434,474, the first volume of the new Reader’s Guide 426,240, and the second volume of the Guide 326,354. Altogether that’s 1,187,068 words – or 1,304,120 if one were to add the appendices and other matter. Because the Chronology and Reader’s Guide once again are to be available separately as well as together in a set, we included our preface in both the Chronology and volume 1 of the Reader’s Guide, and a comprehensive index to the set in both the Chronology and volume 2 of the Guide. In order to balance the three volumes as much as possible, however, we moved the family trees and bibliographical matter from the Chronology (where we had them in 2006) to the second volume of the Guide, and included our list of works consulted in the Guide (the second volume) only.

Often we have pointed out that the Companion and Guide contains a great deal of previously unpublished material by Tolkien himself, especially in the form of extracts from letters. This is true again for the new edition, part and parcel of the material newly added for 2017 as Christina indicated in our previous post. There Christina mentioned some of the new articles in the Reader’s Guide; a complete list may be found on our website.

The Chronology has also been much expanded. This was the volume I worked on at the start of our revision, while Christina dealt first with the Guide. I began by making, in our design software, a copy of the Chronology as we sent it to HarperCollins in 2006, which I then corrected according to the corrigenda we had posted on our website or compiled towards the new edition. (Later I did the same for the Reader’s Guide.) After this I began to insert existing Chronology addenda, but immediately saw that the history should more properly start not in 1889 with the birth of Edith Bratt, Tolkien’s future wife, but in 1857 with the birth of Tolkien’s father, Arthur, and that the timeline of events regarding Arthur and Mabel Suffield, Tolkien’s mother, which we had related in our entry for 1891, would be best presented as separate entries.

There were many tempting research tracks to follow in these early years, aided by an increased number of resources since 2006, both in print and online. A special mention should be made of the Ancestry website (ancestry.co.uk), to which I returned often. One of the most interesting avenues to explore traced the birth, baptism, parentage, and upbringing of Edith Bratt, made possible by access to documents (wills and divorce proceedings) regarding the relationship between her mother, Frances ‘Fannie’ Bratt, and her father, Alfred Frederick Warrillow. Other topics of research included the ship Roslin Castle, which Mabel Suffield took to join Arthur Tolkien in South Africa, and the cause of Arthur’s death, about which there are questions. Such research is part of the fun of writing books like this.

When I got to Tolkien’s time at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, and especially to his undergraduate days at Oxford, I felt that we should have more documentation than we did in our original edition; and numerous mentions of his school and university friends suggested that they should have at least brief biographical entries in the Reader’s Guide. John Garth had already dealt with some of this matter in his booklet on Tolkien at Exeter College, but I researched each of the friends independently, through Ancestry and other sources.

And so it went throughout the Chronology, as I inserted material from existing addenda, wrote new entries for information that came to light while we prepared the new edition, and augmented the section of notes at the end of the Chronology proper. Once again, as in 2006, as soon as we submitted our final text to HarperCollins still more letters by Tolkien surfaced, and more continue to come to light. As before, we’ll document the most important of these, and other information that comes our way, in a reconstituted online Addenda and Corrigenda.

I should say something also about our new list of “Works Consulted”. Readers of our first edition will recall that we printed a dagger before each title that we considered ‘particularly useful for an appreciation of Tolkien’s life and works’. Now, having drawn from so many more sources for our new edition – the number grew by more than fifty per cent compared with our previous list – we found it too difficult to define what we meant by ‘useful’, and decided to omit daggers altogether. Instead, it should be taken as a measure of ‘usefulness’, at least according to our opinion, if we cited, and sometimes commented on, a source in the text of the Companion and Guide.

Advertisement