The Return Of The Shadow (The History Of the Lord Of The Rings Part 1), by J.R.R. Tolkien

If someone is a would-be writer of a fantasy epic in the same way that J.R.R. Tolkien was, this book is the sort of volume that is likely to give one hope.  It can be a bit intimidating for some readers to tackle Tolkien’s writing in its finished form, and then to wonder at how much more he could have written had he been a more fluent writer in the same way that his friend C.S. Lewis was.  Yet for precisely that reason this book can serve as encouragement to those who have as hard a time as Tolkien did in writing books.  This book gives somewhat painstaking evidence of the way that Tolkien began and re-started his novel over and over again, changing the name of his characters multiple times and how they were related to each other and only gradually coming to realize the cosmic importance of the work to the Middle Earth that he had already started to write about in fragments and stories.  Given how many times that Tolkien started over and over again and fussed over the relative chronology and character names and back stories, it is remarkable that he managed to write so much at all.

This book is more than 450 pages and is divided into several parts.  The first half of the book or so consists of thirteen chapters that give the first pass that Tolkien had for the story, beginning with the party (1), moving along to the initial journey of the hobbits (2), to a discussion of the relationship between Gollum and the ring (3), to Buckland (4), the old forest (5) and meeting Tom Bombadil (6) as well as the barrow-wight (7) and the arrival at Bree (8).  There are chapters about the journey to Weathertop (9) and the attack there (10) as well as the trip to the Ford (11), the journey to Rivendell (12), and some queries and alterations up to that point (13).  After this comes a second phase where Hobbin is returned to (14), some ancient history is dealt with (15), delays are introduced (16), a shortcut to mushrooms is provided (17), and the journey from Buckland is covered again (18).  The third phase then looks at the journey to Bree again (19), what happens at the Prancing Pony Inn (20), the journeys to Weathertop and Rivendell revisited (21), and more uncertainties and projections.  The book then ends with a discussion about what happens in the house of Elrond (23), the movement of the ring south (24), and the first pass at the Mines of Moria (25) along with some illustrations.

Admittedly, this sort of book is not an easy one to read if one is looking for a continuous narrative.  That said, few people are likely to read a book like this for that purpose, since those who read the book will almost certainly have read the Lord of the Rings one or a few times and are curious as to how it was that Tolkien came up with the story over time and thought and reworking his ideas.  Again, the Lord of the Rings did not come fully armed from Tolkien’s imagination.  The story started out seeming straightforward for him and then it became more complicated and tied into a larger and larger series of myths involving the decline of the Elves and the conflict between cosmic good and evil and earlier eras of history.  Of course, Tolkien had a lot in his head and so it makes sense that a ranger would eventually become a king with several different names depending on who he was talking to, or how many of the characters are known by various names depending on who is talking to or about them, and it is interesting to see Treebeard begin as a villain before moving to a more heroic role as a brave and powerful tree.