2012م - 1444هـ
The Fellowship of the Ring

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is often erroneously

called a trilogy, when it is in fact a single novel, consisting

of six books plus appendices, sometimes published in three

volumes.

The first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, was published

in Great Britain by the London firm George Allen & Unwin

on 29 July 1954; an American edition followed on 21 October

of the same year, published by Houghton Mifflin Company

of Boston. In the production of this first volume, Tolkien

experienced what became for him a continual problem:

printer’s errors and compositor’s mistakes, including wellintentioned ‘corrections’ of his sometimes idiosyncratic

usage. These ‘corrections’ include the altering of dwarves to

dwarfs, elvish to elfish, further to farther, nasturtians to nasturtiums, try and say to try to say and (‘worst of all’ to Tolkien)

elven to elfin. In a work such as The Lord of the Rings,

containing invented languages and delicately constructed

nomenclatures, errors and inconsistencies impede both the

understanding and the appreciation of serious readers – and

Tolkien had many such readers from very early on.