Books :

Writing :

The Lord of the Rings was started as a sequel to The Hobbit, a fantasy story that Tolkien had written for, and read to, his children, which was published in 1937.The popularity of The Hobbit led to demands from his publishers for more stories about Hobbits and goblins, and so that same year, at the age of 45, Tolkien began writing the story that would become The Lord of the Rings. The story would not be finished until 12 years later, in 1949, and it would not be fully published until 1955, by which time Tolkien was 63 years old.

Tolkien did not originally intend to write a sequel to The Hobbit, and instead wrote several other children's tales, including Roverandom. As his main work, Tolkien began to outline the history of Arda, telling tales of the Silmarils, and many other stories of how the races and situations that we read about in the Lord of the Rings came to be. Tolkien died before he could complete and put together this work, today known as The Silmarillion, but his son Christopher Tolkien edited his father's work, filled in gaps, and published it in 1977. Some Tolkien biographers regard The Silmarillion as the true "work of his heart", as it provides the historical and linguistic context for the more popular work and for his constructed languages, and occupied the greater part of Tolkien's time. As a result The Lord of the Rings ended up as the last movement of Tolkien's legendarium and in his own opinion "much larger, and I hope also in proportion the best, of the entire cycle.

Persuaded by his publishers, he started 'a new Hobbit' in December 1937. After several false starts, the story of the One Ring soon emerged, and the book mutated from being a sequel to The Hobbit, to being, in theme, more a sequel to the unpublished Silmarillion. The idea of the first chapter ("A Long-Expected Party") arrived fully-formed, although the reasons behind Bilbo's disappearance, the significance of the Ring, and the title The Lord of the Rings did not arrive until the spring of 1938. Originally, he planned to write another story in which Bilbo had used up all his treasure and was looking for another adventure to gain more; however, he remembered the ring and its powers and decided to write about it instead. He began with Bilbo as the main character but decided that the story was too serious to use the fun-loving hobbit and so Tolkien looked to use a member of Bilbo's family.[10] He thought about using Bilbo's son, but this generated some difficult questions, such as the whereabouts of his wife and whether he would let his son go into danger. Thus he looked for an alternate character to carry the ring. In Greek legend, it was a hero's nephew that gained the item of power, and so the hobbit Frodo came into existence. (Though technically Tolkien made Frodo Bilbo's cousin, because of age differences, the two were to consider each other nephew and uncle).

Writing was slow due to Tolkien's perfectionism, and was frequently interrupted by his obligations as an examiner, and other academic duties. The first sentence of The Hobbit was in fact written on a blank page which a student had left on an exam paper which Tolkien was marking — "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." He seems to have abandoned The Lord of the Rings during most of 1943 and only re-started it in April 1944. This effort was written as a serial for Christopher Tolkien and C.S. Lewis — the former would be sent copies of chapters as they were written while he was serving in South Africa in the Royal Air Force. He made another push in 1946, and showed a copy of the manuscript to his publishers in 1947. The story was effectively finished the next year, but Tolkien did not finish revising earlier parts of the work until 1949.

A dispute with his publishers, Allen & Unwin, led to the book being offered to Collins in 1950. He intended The Silmarillion (itself largely unrevised at this point) to be published along with The Lord of the Rings, but A&U were unwilling to do this. After his contact at Collins, Milton Waldman, expressed the belief that The Lord of the Rings itself "urgently needed cutting", he eventually demanded that they publish the book in 1952. They did not do so, and so Tolkien wrote to Allen and Unwin, saying "I would gladly consider the publication of any part of the stuff."

Publication :

For publication, due largely to post-war paper shortages, but also to keep the price of the first volume down, the book was divided into three volumes: The Fellowship of the Ring: Books I and II, The Two Towers: Books III and IV, and The Return of the King: Books V and VI plus six appendices. Delays in producing appendices, maps and especially indices led to these being published later than originally hoped — on 21 July 1954, on 11 November 1954 and on 20 October 1955 respectively in the United Kingdom, slightly later in the United States. The Return of the King was especially delayed. Tolkien, moreover, did not especially like the title The Return of the King, believing it gave away too much of the storyline. He had originally suggested The War of the Ring, which was dismissed by his publishers.

Cover of the 1968 one-volume UK paperback edition, drawn by Pauline Baynes.

The books were published under a 'profit-sharing' arrangement, whereby Tolkien would not receive an advance or royalties until the books had broken even, after which he would take a large share of the profits. An index to the entire three-volume set at the end of third volume was promised in the first volume. However, this proved impractical to compile in a reasonable timescale. Later, in 1966, four indices, not compiled by Tolkien, were added to The Return of the King. Because the three-volume binding was so widely distributed, the work is often referred to as the Lord of the Rings "trilogy". In a letter to the poet W. H. Auden (who famously reviewed the final volume in 1956), Tolkien himself made use of the term "trilogy" for the work though he did at other times consider this incorrect, as it was written and conceived as a single book.[17] It is also often called a novel; however, Tolkien also objected to this term as he viewed it as a romance[18] ("romance" in this sense refers to a heroic tale).
A 1999 (Millennium Edition) British (ISBN 0-261-10387-3) seven-volume box set followed the six-book division authored by Tolkien, with the Appendices from the end of The Return of the King bound as a separate volume. The letters of Tolkien appeared on the spines of the boxed set which included a CD. To coincide with the film release, a new version of this popular edition was released featuring images from the films, such as:
· I - Frodo climbing the steps to Bag End
· II - Aragorn and Arwen in Rivendell
· III - Gandalf in Moria
· IV - A swan boat from Lothlórien
· V - A Black Rider from the 'Flight to the Ford' sequence
· VI - The tower of Cirith Ungol (although this image featured in many of the promotional books from the first film, it did not feature in the films until Return of the King)
· Appendix - Frodo's hand holding the One Ring
This new imprint (ISBN 0-00-763555-9) also omitted the CD.
The individual names for books in this series were decided posthumously, based on a combination of suggestions Tolkien had made during his lifetime and the titles of the existing volumes:
· Book I: The Return of the Shadow
· Book II: The Fellowship of the Ring
· Book III: The Treason of Isengard
· Book IV: The Journey to Mordor
· Book V: The War of the Ring
· Book VI: The Return of the King
· Appendices
The name of the complete work is often abbreviated to 'LotR', 'LOTR', or simply 'LR' (Tolkien himself used L.R.), and the three volumes as FR, FOTR, or FotR (The Fellowship of the Ring), TT or TTT (The Two Towers), and RK, ROTK, or RotK (The Return of the King).
The titles The Return of the Shadow, The Treason of Isengard and The War of the Ring were eventually used by Christopher Tolkien in The History of The Lord of the Rings.