The Lord of The Rings: A Reader's Companion

The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion (2005) is a nonfiction book written by scholars Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. It is an annotated reference to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Hammond and Scull proceed chapter-by-chapter from the original foreword through to the end of The Lord of the Rings. Appendices, examining the evolution of the text, changes, inconsistencies, and errors, often using comments from Tolkien's own notes and letters. Other sections cover the numerous maps of Middle-earth, chronologies of the story and its writing, and notes on the book and jacket design of the first editions of 1954-56. The book includes some previously unpublished material by Tolkien. It also reprints part of a 1951 letter in which Tolkien explicates, at some length, his conception and vision of The Lord of the Rings. Reprinted for the first time since 1980, and corrected and expanded, is Tolkien's Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings (previously referred to as Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings), an index of persons, places, and things designed to aid the translator in rendering Tolkien's great work into foreign languages. It is available in both hardcover and paperback.

The Reader's Companion was designed to accompany the revised one-volume 50th anniversary edition of The Lord of the Rings(Houghton Mifflin, 2004; ISBN 0-618-51765-0).

The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion won the 2006 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies.

Famous quotes containing the words the lord, lord, reader and/or companion:

    “Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.”
    —Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)

    “The battle of the North Atlantic is a grim business, and it isn’t going to be won by charm and personality.”
    —Edmund H. North, British screenwriter, and Lewis Gilbert. First Sea Lord (Laurence Naismith)

    “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.”
    —Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)

    “One who was my companion in my two previous excursions to these woods, tells me that ... he found himself dining one day on moose-meat, mud turtle, trout, and beaver, and he thought that there were few places in the world where these dishes could easily be brought together on one table.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)