Rayner Unwin did not need to be asked twice. He suggested that Tolkien should send the manuscript of The Lord of the Rings to Allen & Unwin at once, by registered post. But Tolkien had only one typescript of the book in its final and revised form, and he did not want to consign that to the post. He wanted to hand it over in person – and, as it happened, that was not possible for some weeks. During August he was on holiday in Ireland, and in the same month he visited George Sayer, a friend of C. S. Lewis, who taught at Malvern College and who often visited the Inklings. While Tolkien was staying with Sayer in Worcestershire, his host recorded him reading and singing from The Hobbit and from the typescript of The Lord of the Rings, which he had brought with him. When he listened to these recordings, Tolkien was ‘much surprised to discover their effectiveness as recitations, and (if I may say so) my own effectiveness as a narrator’. Many years later, after Tolkien’s death, the tapes made on this occasion were issued on long-playing gramophone records.
Tolkien had never before encountered a tape-recorder at close quarters – he pretended to regard Sayer’s machine with great suspicion, pronouncing the Lord’s Prayer in Gothic into the microphone to cast out any devils that might be lurking within. But after the recording sessions at Malvern he was so impressed with the device that he acquired a machine to use at home, and began to amuse himself by making further tapes of his work. Some years previously he had written what proved to be a very effective ‘radio play’. Entitled The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm’s Son, it is in effect a ‘sequel’ to the Anglo-Saxon poem The Battle of Maldon, for it recounts an imaginary episode after that battle when two servants of the duke Beorhtnoth come in the darkness to retrieve their master’s corpse from the battlefield. Written in a modern equivalent of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, it marks the passing of the heroic age, whose characteristics are exemplified and contrasted in the youthful romantic Torhthelm and the practical old farmer Tidwald. The Home coming of Beorhtnoth was in existence by 1945, but it was not published until 1953, in which year it appeared in Essays and Studies. It was never performed on a stage, but a year after publication it was transmitted on the BBC Third Programme. Tolkien was deeply irritated by this radio production, which ignored the alliterative metre and delivered the verse as if it were iambic pentameters. He himself recorded a version that was much more to his own satisfaction on the tape-recorder in his study at home in which he not only played both parts but improvised some dextrous sound-effects. Although made purely for personal amusement, this recording is a fine demonstration of Tolkien’s not inconsiderable talents as an actor. He had shown these talents before the war, when in 1938 and 1939 he had impersonated Chaucer in the ‘Summer Diversions’ arranged in Oxford by Nevill Coghill and John Masefield. On these occasions he had recited from memory the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and (the next year) The Reeve’s Tale. He was not enthusiastic about drama as an art-form, considering it to be tiresomely anthropocentric and therefore restricting. But he did not extend this dislike to the dramatic recitation of verse, in which category he presumably placed his own Beorhtnoth.
On 19 September 1952 Rayner Unwin came to Oxford and collected the typescript of The Lord of the Rings. His father, Sir Stanley Unwin was in Japan, so it was up to Rayner himself to make the next moves. He decided not to delay by rereading the bulky typescript, for he had seen virtually all of it five years earlier, and he still had a vivid impression of the story. Instead he began immediately to obtain an estimate of production costs, for he was concerned to keep the price of the book within the limit to which the ordinary buyer (and the circulating libraries in particular) would go. After calculations and discussions in the Allen & Unwin offices, it seemed that the best thing would be to divide the book into three volumes, which could be sold (with only a small profit margin) at twenty-one shillings each. This was still a lot of money, rather more than the top price for a novel, but it was the best that could be done. Rayner sent a telegram to his father to ask whether they could publish the book, admitting that it was ‘a big risk’ and warning that the firm could lose up to a thousand pounds through the project. But he concluded that in his opinion it was a work of genius. Sir Stanley replied by cable, telling him to publish it.
On 10 November 1952 Rayner Unwin wrote to Tolkien to say that the firm would like to publish The Lord of the Rings under a profit-sharing agreement. This meant that Tolkien would not receive conventional royalty payments on a percentage basis. Instead he would be paid ‘half profits’ that is, he would receive nothing until the sales of the book had been sufficient to cover its costs, but thenceforward he would share equally with the publisher in any profits that might accrue. This method, which had once been common practice but was by this time little used by other firms, was still favoured by Sir Stanley Unwin for all potentially uneconomical books. It helped to keep down the price of such books, since there was no need to include an additional sum in the costing to cover the author’s royalties. On the other hand if the book sold unexpectedly well, the author would benefit more substantially than under a royalty agreement. Not that Allen & Unwin expected The Lord of the Rings to sell more than a few thousand copies, for it was bulky, unconventional, and did not appeal to any one ‘market’ being neither a children’s book nor an adult novel.
The news soon spread among Tolkien’s friends that the book had at last been accepted for publication. C. S. Lewis wrote to congratulate him, remarking: ‘I think the prolonged pregnancy has drained a little vitality from you: there’ll be a new ripeness and freedom when the book’s out.’ At that particular moment Tolkien felt anything but free. He wanted to read the typescript of the book once more before it went to the printers, and to iron out any remaining inconsistencies. (Fortunately Rayner Unwin had not asked him to make any cuts, such as Milton Waldman had suggested.) There was also the tricky matter of the appendices to the book, which he had planned for some time; they were to contain information that was relevant to the story but which could not be fitted into the narrative. As yet these appendices existed only in the form of rough drafts and scattered notes, and he could see that it would take a great deal of time to organise them. He was also worried about the necessity of making a clear and accurate map to accompany the book, for a number of topographical and narrative changes had rendered the working map (drawn by Christopher many years before) inaccurate and inadequate. Besides all this, he had a backlog of many years’ academic work on hand which he could no longer ignore. And he had decided to move house yet again.
The house in Holywell Street, where the Tolkiens had lived since 1950, was a building of much character, but it was made almost unbearable by the stream of motor traffic that roared past it all day and much of the night. ‘This charming house,’ Tolkien wrote, ‘has become uninhabitable: unsleepable-in, unworkable-in, rocked, racked with noise, and drenched with fumes. Such is modern life. Mordor in our midst.’ He and Edith were now on their own, Priscilla having left Oxford to work in Bristol; and Edith had become very lame from rheumatism and arthritis, so that she found the many stairs in the house troublesome. By the spring of 1953 Tolkien had found and bought a house in Headington, a quiet Oxford suburb to the east of the city. He and Edith moved there in March.
Despite the dislocation caused by the move, Tolkien managed to complete his final revision for what was to be the first volume of The Lord of the Rings by mid-April, and he sent it to Allen & Unwin for typesetting to begin. Soon afterwards he delivered the text of the second volume. He had already discussed with Rayner Unwin the question of independent titles for the three volumes, which Unwin considered preferable to an overall title with volume numbers. Although the book was one continuous story and not a trilogy – a point that Tolkien was always concerned to emphasise – it was felt that it would be best if it appeared volume by volume under different titles, thus earning three sets of reviews rather than one, and perhaps disguising the sheer size of the book. Tolkien was never entirely happy about the division, and he insisted on retaining The Lord of the Rings as the overall title. But after a good deal of discussion he and Rayner eventually agreed upon The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King for the volume titles, though Tolkien really preferred ‘The War of the Ring’ for the third volume, as it gave away less of the story.
The ‘production’ problems that Tolkien now encountered were similar to those he had met with in The Hobbit. He cared very much that his beloved book should be published as he had intended, but once again many of his designs were modified, frequently through considerations of cost. Among items that were declared to be too expensive were red ink for the ‘fire-letters’ which appear on the Ring, and the halftone colour process that would be necessary to reproduce the facsimile Tolkien had made of ‘The Book of Mazarbul’ a burnt and tattered volume that (in the story) is found in the Mines of Moria. He was much saddened by this, for he had spent many hours making this facsimile, copying out the pages in runes and elvish writing, and then deliberately damaging them, burning the edges and smearing the paper with substances that looked like dried blood. All this work was now wasted.1 He was also infuriated by his first sight of the proofs, for he found that the printers had changed several of his spellings, altering dwarves to dwarfs, elvish to elfish, further to farther, and (‘worst of all’ said Tolkien) elvin to elfin. The printers were reproved; they said in self-defence that they had merely followed the dictionary spellings. (Similar ‘corrections’ to Tolkien’s spellings were made in 1961 when Puffin Books issued The Hobbit as a paperback, and this time to Tolkien’s distress the mistake was not discovered until the book had reached the shops.) Another worry was the matter of the map, still not dealt with; or rather the maps, for an additional plan of the Shire was now thought to be necessary. ‘I am stumped,’ Tolkien wrote in October 1953. ‘Indeed in a panic. They are essential; and urgent; but I just cannot get them done.’ In the end he handed over the job to his original map-maker, Christopher, who somehow managed to interpret his father’s overlaid, altered, and often contradictory rough sketches, and to produce from them a readable and neatly lettered general map and smaller plan of the Shire.
The first volume of The Lord of the Rings was to be published in the summer of 1954, and the remaining two volumes were to follow one by one after short intervals. There was only a modest print order: three and a half thousand copies of the first volume and slightly fewer of the other two, for the publishers considered that this should be enough to cater for the moderate interest the book was expected to attract. As to publicity, Rayner Unwin had panicked at the thought of writing a ‘blurb’ for the dust-jacket of the book, for it defied conventional description. So he and his father solicited the help of three authors who were likely to have something worth saying about it: Naomi Mitchison, who was a devotee of The Hobbit, Richard Hughes, who had long ago praised the first book, and C. S. Lewis. All three responded with fluent words of commendation, Mrs Mitchison comparing The Lord of the Rings with science-fiction and Malory, and Lewis drawing a parallel with Ariosto. (‘I don’t know Ariosto,’ Tolkien once said, ‘and I’d loathe him if I did.’)
Publication day for the first volume approached. It was more than sixteen years since Tolkien had begun to write the book. ‘I am dreading the publication,’ he told his friend Father Robert Murray, ‘for it will be impossible not to mind what is said. I have exposed my heart to be shot at.’
1 Pages from ‘The Book of Mazarbul’ were eventually reproduced in the ‘Tolkien Calendar’ for 1977.