[William Cloud Hicklin]

I think there is a tendency often to very much exaggerate the degree of Authorial Intent to be attached to the published text of the Lord of the Rings, as if "This is FINAL and OFFICIAL and represents Tolkien's consciously determined LAST WORD." The more I work with Tolkien's manuscripts, the clearer it is to me that this is not at all the case; that the text published in 1954-55 represents merely a contingent state, a transverse cut across an ongoing development that became "fixed" not because Tolkien had decided that it was finished, final and complete, but because it was physically taken out of his hands so that he couldn't continue to monkey with it. Even in the course of the typescript for the printers - weeks and months past deadline - he was rewriting things. Even on the galley proofs (which for normal authors exist to correct typos), he was rewriting things. Had not Rayner Unwin practically put a gun to his head and made him give up the papers, he probably would have spent the last two decades of his life continuing to alter and reshape The Lord of the Rings just as he did with The Silmarillion.