The Romance of the Middle Ages

J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) was Professor of Anglo-Saxon, and then Merton Professor of English in Oxford from 1925 to 1959. His phenomenally successful fictions draw on many influences, from Old Norse and Celtic mythology, to Old English poems such as Beowulf, to biblical narratives, romances, and medievalist and popular fiction, including William Morris’s books. This draft page is from The Two Towers, second book in The Lord of the Rings trilogy (published 1954–5). Tolkien’s visual and narrative imagination here works together, as he sketches the mountain pass through which Frodo and Sam attempt to cross into Mordor, where they are attacked by the giant spider Shelob. Tolkien first wrote the text in pencil, before going over it in ink.