BAUMAN RARE BOOKS 36 The Road Goes Ever On: Songs By Tolkien 53TOLKIEN, J.R.R. The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle. Boston, 1967. Quarto, original publisher’s gilt-stamped orange cloth, original dust jacket. $750 First edition (preceding the British issue) of these song-settings from The Lord of the Rings. Early in 1965 the composer and pianist Donald Swann—best known for his comic songs with Michael Flanders, with whom he performed the revue At the Drop of a Hat—set to music several of the poems in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien approved the settings for performance and publication, and the collection, embellished with elvish script and decorations, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1967. Includes a facsimile reproduction of Tolkien’s original manuscript for “Namárië.” Hammond & Anderson B28a. Book in fine condition; dust jacket very good with small spots of insect damage to folds and spine foot. “The Most Influential Fantasy Novel Ever Written” 54TOLKIEN, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. London, 1966. Three volumes. Octavo, modern three-quarter red morocco gilt. $8000 Second edition—with the author’s new foreword and his revisions to the text throughout—of Tolkien’s stirring tour de force, finely bound. “The most influential fantasy novel ever written” (Clute & Grant, 951). Although immediately occasioned by his publisher’s request for a sequel to The Hobbit (1937), Tolkien’s incomparable epic draws on lore, legends and languages of Middle-Earth that he had been creating since the First World War. He wrote The Lord of the Rings during World War II in letters to his son, “and finally, having polished it to his own satisfaction, published it as a trilogy from 1954 to 1955… [It is considered] one of this century’s lasting contributions to that borderland of literature between youth and age… [It] seems destined to become this century’s contribution to that select list of books which continue through the ages to be read by children and adults with almost equal pleasure” (Eyre, 134-35). Fine condition.
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