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INDEX
Compiled by Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which
it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of
your e-book reader.
This list has been compiled independent of that prepared by
Nancy Smith and revised by J.R.R. Tolkien for the second edition
(1965) ofThe Lord of the Rings and augmented in later
printings; but for the final result reference has been made to the
earlier index in order to resolve questions of content and to
preserve Tolkien’s occasional added notes and ‘translations’
[here indicated within square brackets]. We have also referred
to the index that Tolkien himself began to prepare during 1954,
but which he left unfinished after dealing only with place-names.
He had intended, as he said in his original foreword to The Lord
of the Rings, to provide ‘an index of names and strange words
with some explanations’; but it soon became clear that such a
work would be too long and costly, easily a short volume unto
itself. (Tolkien’s manuscript list of place-names informed his
son Christopher’s indexes in The Silmarillion and Unfinished
Tales, and is referred to also in the present authors’ The Lord of
the Rings: A Reader’s Companion.)
Readers have long complained that the original index is too
brief and fragmented for serious use. In the present work
citations are given more comprehensively for names of persons,
places, and things, and unusual (invented) words, mentioned or
alluded to in the text (i.e. excluding the maps); and there is a
single main sequence of entries, now preceded by a list of poems
and songs by first line and a list of poems and phrases in languages
other than English (Common Speech). Nonetheless,
although this new index is greatly enlarged compared with its
predecessor, some constraints on its length were necessary so
that it might fit comfortably after the Appendices. Thus it has
not been possible to index separately or to cross-reference every
variation of every name in The Lord of the Rings (of which there
are thousands), and we have had to be particularly selective