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) of The 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 when indexing Appendices D through F, concentrating on those names or terms that feature in the main text, and when subdividing entries by aspect.

Primary entry elements have been chosen usually according to predominance in The Lord of the Rings, but sometimes based on familiarity or ease of reference: thus (for instance) predominant Nazgûl rather than Ringwraiths or even less frequent Black Riders, and predominant and familiar Treebeard rather than Fangorn, with cross-references from (as they seem to us) the most important alternate terms. Names of bays, bridges, fords, gates, towers, vales, etc. including ‘Bay’, ‘Bridge’, etc. are entered usually under the principal element, e.g. Belfalas, Bay of rather than Bay of Belfalas. Names of battles and mountains are entered directly, e.g. Battle of Bywater, Mount Doom. With one exception (Rose Cotton), married female hobbits are indexed under the husband’s surname, with selective cross-references from maiden names.