p. xv, l. 14: For ‘assitance’ read ‘assistance’. Corrected in 2005 printings.
p. xix: For ‘Yuval Kfir’ read ‘Yuval Welis’.
p. xx, l. 17: For ‘felicitous - subtle’ (with a hyphen) read ‘felicitous – subtle’ (with an en dash). Corrected in 2005 printings.
p. xx, final line: For ‘check copied’ read ‘check copies’. Corrected in 2005 printings.
p. 27, l. 20: The en dash at the beginning of this line should be followed by a space.
p. 158, footnote: The (volume number) ‘III’ is superfluous.
p. 159, stanzas beginning ‘They rolled the Man slowly up the hill’: Two stanzas have been pushed together. There should be a space following the line ‘and a dish ran up with the spoon’.
p. 373, l. 8: For ‘come to bid our’ read ‘come to bid you our’.
p. 1058, l. 11: Merlin DeTardo points out that here ‘Elven-home’ has a hyphen, but otherwise in The Lord of the Rings is spelled ‘Elvenhome’. The hyphenated form, which dates from the first printing of The Return of the King, is indeed unique, and had we noticed it we might have suggested that it be regularized to the predominant ‘Elvenhome’ for the sake of consistency.
p. 1079: In the text below the genealogical chart, ‘Dáin I slain by a dragon, 2589’ should be followed by a full stop, by analogy with the accompanying lines of text.
p. 1100: The death date of Bingo Baggins should read ‘1360’. The error ‘1363’ entered in the 1994 edn., but was correct in the 2002 copy-text we examined.
p. 1111, note 1: For ‘matters’ read ‘other matters’.
p. 1116, l. 12: For ‘dictated’ read ‘indicated’.
p. 1120, l. 19: For ‘8 =d’ read ‘8=d’, with the space after ‘8’ closed up by analogy with other text in this paragraph.
p. 1123, n. 1, l. 3: For ‘hr’ read ‘hr’.
We have been asked which of ‘sword-thain’, as printed (with a hyphen) on p. 777, and ‘swordthain’, as printed (without a hyphen) on pp. 803 and 804, is the correct form. Each is acceptable, but a distinct preference by Tolkien cannot be determined from so small a sampling. The same is true in regard to ‘City of the Kings’ (i.e. Gondor) on p. 973 but ‘city of the Kings’ on p. 1062; and here it may be that Tolkien chose, in the first instance, to capitalize ‘City’ as a means of denoting special import or majesty to the name.
Another question that has been put to us concerns the poem The Road Goes Ever On and On as spoken by Bilbo and Frodo on pp. 35 and 73 respectively. In the first instance, the lines ‘Until it joins some larger way / Where many paths and errands meet’ do not have a comma following ‘way’, but there is a comma after ‘way’ in the second instance. Which is correct? This punctuation has been the same since the first printing of The Fellowship of the Ring, and the manuscripts as presented in The Return of the Shadow offer no help. In the circumstances, we would judge that there is no means of saying that one version or the other is correct and the other is not. Indeed, both may have been intended by Tolkien: Bilbo having set off with ‘eager feet’, it could be argued that the absence of a comma in his verse suggests eagerness, while a comma in Frodo’s verse slows its pace appropriate to his ‘weary feet’.
p. 1149, col. 1, entry for ‘Company of the Ring’: In the penultimate line, for ‘872 Nine Walkers’ read ‘872; Nine Walkers’.
p. 1152, col. 1, entry for ‘Eldacar, of Anor’: For ‘Anor’ read ‘Arnor’.
p. 1156, col. 1, entry for ‘First Age’: For ‘1107’ read ‘1108’.
p. 1156, col. 2, entry for ‘Gamgee, Frodo’: For ‘Frodo’ read ‘Frodo (Frodo Gardner)’.
p. 1157, col. 1, add entry: ‘Gamgee, Holfast (Holfast Gardner) 1105’.
p. 1157, col. 2, entry for ‘Gardner, Frodo’: Delete citation, add cross-reference: ‘see Gamgee, Frodo (Frodo Gardner)’.
p. 1157, col. 2, entry for ‘Gardner, Holfast’: Delete citation, add cross-reference: ‘see Gamgee, Holfast (Holfast Gardner)’.
p. 1159, col. 1, entry for ‘Grip’: For ‘Grip’ read ‘Grip (Farmer Maggot’s dog)’ to be consistent with our entries for Fang and Wolf.
p. 1168, col. 1, entry for ‘Oliphaunt’: The citations should read, in correct order and without repetition, ‘646, 647, 661, 662, 675, 811, 828, 843, 845, 846, 848, 858, 937, 957, 987’.
p. 1171, col. 1, entry for ‘Rúmil’: Replace with two entries:
Rúmil (Elf of Lothlórien) 343, 344, 346, 347
Rúmil (Noldo, inventor of letters) 1117
Add entry: ‘Spiders 723; see also Shelob; Ungoliant’.
p. 1175, col. 2, entry for ‘Took, Hildigard’, add citation: 1103.
We would like to thank the Departamento de Traduccion Irreverente, Merlin DeTardo, Timothy Fisher, Carl Hostetter, Yuval Kfir, and Tik (Finland) for calling some of these errors to our attention.
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