To Rivendell via Anduin

A week with the Lord of the Rings manuscripts

I just spent a week with the Lord of the Rings manuscripts at Marquette University. Research is one of the activities that this Steady crowdfunding project supports – so if you contribute to that, it was partly with your help.

I’d give a lot to see a photograph of the Lord of the Rings papers when they first arrived in 1957 – all 9,200 pages or more. But archivist Bill Fliss tells me there’s no evidence that such photos were ever taken.

Marquette paid £1,500 for these manuscripts (some of them actually typescripts, of course) plus those for The Hobbit, Farmer Giles of Ham and Mr. Bliss – a total of nearly 11,000 MS pages.