How long does it take to read The Return of the Shadow?
J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien
The Return of the Shadow by J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien takes about 9 hours 7 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
Book 6 of The History of Middle-earth
Previous: The Lost Road and Other Writings Next: The History of The Lord of the Rings
About 9 hours 7 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1988. 497 pages, about 136,675 words.
19 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 15 hours 11 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 9 hours 7 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 42 minutes |
The page count is the median across 14 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The Return of the Shadow is the first volume of the The History of The Lord of the Rings and the sixth volume of The History of Middle-earth. It is a history of the creation of The Lord of the Rings, a fascinating study of Tolkien's great masterpiece, from its inception to the end of the first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring. In The Return of the Shadow (the abandoned title of the first volume of The Lord of the Rings) Christopher Tolkien describes, with full citation of the earliest notes, outline plans, and narrative drafts, the intricate evolution of The Fellowship of the Ring and the gradual emergence of the conceptions that transformed what J.R.R. Tolkien for long believed would be a far shorter book, 'a sequel to The Hobbit'. The enlargement of Bilbo's 'magic ring' into the supremely potent and dangerous Ruling Ring of the Dark Lord is traced and the precise moment is seen when, in an astonishing and unforeseen leap in the earliest narrative, a Black Rider first rode into the Shire, his significance still unknown. The character of the hobbit called Trotter (afterwards Strider or Aragorn) is developed while his indentity remains an absolute puzzle, and the suspicion only very slowly becomes certainty that he must after all be a Man. The hobbits, Frodo's companions, undergo intricate permutations of name and personality, and other major figures appear in strange modes: a sinister Treebeard, in league with the Enemy, a ferocious and malevolent Farmer Maggot. The story in this book ends at the point where J.R.R. Tolkien halted in the story for a long time, as the Company of the Ring, still lacking Legolas and Gimli, stood before the tomb of Balin in the Mines of Moria. The Return of the Shadow is illustrated with reproductions of the first maps and notable pages from the earliest manuscripts.
Subjects: English Fantasy fiction, Middle Earth (Imaginary place), History and criticism, Lord of the rings, Fantasy fiction, English, Criticism, Textual
