The story was conceived and written as a whole and the only natural divisions are the 'books' I-VI (which originally had titles).įurther details can be found in this excellent article from The Tolkien Society: " The Lord of the Rings: The Tale of a Text":
There is no real division into 3, nor is any one part intelligible alone.
That and the titles of the volumes was a fudge thought necessary for publication, owing to length and cost. I taken by itself and several critics have obviously not got far beyond Chapter I. 'Trilogy', which is not really accurate, is partly to blame. The (unavoidable) disadvantage of issuing in three parts has been shown in the 'shapelessness' that several readers have found, since that is true if one volume is supposed to stand alone. If not, I can at the moment think of nothing better than : I The Shadow Grows II The Ring in the Shadow III The War of the Ring or The Return of the King. III The War of the Ring, and The End of the Third Age'? II The Treason of Isengard, and The Ring goes East Vol. I The Ring Sets out and The Ring Goes South Vol. Would it not do if the 'book-titles' were used: e.g. But I do not find it easy, as the 'books', though they must be grouped in pairs, are not really paired and the middle pair (III/IV) are not really related. I have given some thought to the matter of sub-titles for the volumes, which you thought were desirable. To back that up, we can refer to Tolkien's letters:
Because of post-World War II paper shortages, it was originally published in three volumes. Tolkien regarded it as a single work and divided it into a prologue, six books, and five appendices. It shouldn't even be called 3 books, since Tolkien didn't refer to them as books, but as volumes, and any time he used the word he air-quoted it as 'books'. TL DR Tolkien himself did NOT consider it a trilogy.
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