The Lord of the Rings in Translation
My Collection

Beginnings

Like many young people growing to adulthood in the late '60s and early '70s in the United States, I read J.R.R. Tolkien's classic, The Lord of the Rings, until my three-volume set of paperbacks literally fell apart.  (Many of you who first encountered LOTR in those years will recognize the distinctive Barbara Remington covers of the late '60s paperback edition from Ballantine above.)  I replaced them with a good one-volume hardback in L.A. in 1992 (English), but I didn't imagine collecting them at that time.  It was simply a good reliable friend sitting in a place of honor on my bookshelf.

My collection of LOTR in translation began inadvertently in 2005 in Kecskemét, Hungary at a bookstore in the Malom Központ shopping center.  There I saw a one-volume copy of A Gyűrűk Ura for sale and decided that would be a great souvenir of my trip.  Later, on another leg of the trip in Poznań, Poland, I picked up my first copy of Władca Pierścieni at a small bookstore on the old city square.  That was how it began, thinking that I would collect translations into the local languages from the places I had visited.

In the spring of 2008, I was in the last months of a Fulbright Fellowship in Ukraine and bought a copy of Володар Перстенів in a large bookstore, Буква, on Vulytsja Khreshchatyk south of Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv.  In the fall of that year I returned to Ukraine to accompany my wife back to the U.S. and she had purchased a copy of the Russian Властелин Колец.  Хоббит, или  Туда и Обратно as a gift.  My collection had grown from three to five. 

Three years later in the summer of 2011 I was in Prague for a conference and added Pán Prstenů to the collection in Palác knih Luxor, a large bookstore on the Václavské náměstí.  That was followed in  2013, when my wife was on an overnight layover in Vienna and found a copy of Der Herr der Ringe.  In 2015, my sister-in-law in Antwerp got in on the act and sent me In de Ban van de Ring as a gift.  I justified adding this and the German translation as "countries I had visited" because of brief layovers at the airports in Munich and Amsterdam in 2005 and 2008.  Five had become eight.

19 May 2024 Update:  I suppose that I should actually say that I have a copy of one translation in every language that I know of.  Soon after declaring the completion of the first milestone of my dream, I got an email asking if I knew about the Asturian translation.  I placed an order quickly, but not without a moment of embarrassment.  If you know of a language that I haven't included here with a published translation of LOTR, please don't hesitate to write me and remind me that I don't know everything.  And when you write, put "LOTR" clearly in the subject line because sometimes it goes to the Spam folder and I have to be able to quickly notice it and retrieve it.  If you do write me and I haven't responded in a day or two, try again using a different email, my other email (see below), or a private message at the Tolkien Collector's Guide to "Taivo".

Never Ignore Serendipity

The principle of serendipity is simple: You must be looking for something to find something.

I teach History of the English Language at my university.  One day I was doing a general google search for books on the various Germanic languages that might be useful for my course.  Right near the front of my search for "Frisian language", the Frisian translation of FR popped up for sale at the Tolkien Shop.  It was the first of many orders I've placed with the Tolkien Shop in Leiden over the years that I've been collecting.

One of the two most popular pages on my website from the very beginning has been Icelandic.  Then when I later posted the Sinhala page, it supplanted the Icelandic page in first place.  These two are always in the top five in terms of clicks through to the site.  In early October 2023, I was running through some of my links to bookstores not looking for anything in particular, just monitoring anything that caught my eye.  All of a sudden, there was Sinhala B, a new edition of FR and a new translation of TT.  I didn't even leave the site before I had sent my money and placed an order.

On the very same day, less than an hour after completing my transaction in Sri Lanka, I was updating my watchlist on ebay when the AI suggestions at the bottom of the page presented me with Icelandic B, an edition that I had never seen before (even though it was twenty years old).  I ordered it even faster than I had ordered the volumes from Sri Lanka (mainly because ebay is in English and I have to use Google Translate for Sinhala).  On one day I doubled my holdings in the two most-searched-for translations.  They arrived on Friday and Monday surrounding a single weekend a little over a week later (Sri Lanka beat Iceland).

I teach at a university in Utah and on my personal introduction webpage for every class I mention my Tolkien translation collection (with a link to this site, of course).  I even mentioned the translations that were missing at the time.  A couple of years ago, one of my students mentioned that she had served her LDS mission in Georgia and one of her friends there could get me a Georgian translation if I was interested.  Thus Georgian A came into my life.

Notes on the Details

While I own many of Tolkien's works, both on Middle Earth and Middle English, they're overwhelmingly in English.  I've included The Hobbit and The Silmarillion here just because I have translations in a few languages, but I'm not systematically collecting translations of either.  If you see an [H] or an [S] following a language name, that indicates a translation of The Hobbit or The Silmarillion and not LOTR.  If you're interested in collecting The Hobbit, there is no better English language site than The Hobbithunter in the Netherlands.  Another excellent Hobbit site in Spanish is De Imladris a Oxford.  An exceptional site for LOTR, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion in Italian is Tolkieniano Collection.  (Please don't hesitate to point me to similar sites that you know of.)

Throughout the site I have referred to FR (The Fellowship of the Ring), TT (The Two Towers), and RK (The Return of the King).  Tolkien, of course, did not think of his work as a trilogy, but as a single work divided into 6 numbered Books.  When needed, I have referred to these six Books as "Books" (with a capital B).  Some Japanese and Korean editions follow this pattern and publish each of Tolkien's Books as separate volumes rather than following the earliest English publication which put two Books into each of three volumes (for purely business reasons).  This three-volume pattern is the most common publishing standard, followed by the one-volume pattern.  Some early Eastern European editions, such as the first Bulgarian and Russian editions, divided the six Books into two  volumes.  This pattern is not followed in any 21st century editions, however.  Some editions, such as Georgian B, have FR broken into two volumes.  The Appendices are not always present, but when they are they are most commonly bound with RK.  In some editions, such as Dutch E, German A, German F, and Japanese B, they are bound as a separate volume, but this is not common.  A particularly interesting pattern is found in Russian L, where the Appendices are published as the Prologue to FR in the first of two volumes.  In some of the latest volumes of the first Swedish translation, such as Swedish C, the Appendices are bound with three of Tolkien's minor works.   At the bottom of the Table of Contents is a chart to illustrate the different publishing formats found in my collection.

When needed, I refer to the number of "volumes" as being the number of physical, individually-bound units in a particular edition.  I use the term "edition" to refer to a single volume or set of volumes (from two through nine) that comprise a single published product.

I hope you enjoy your visit to my site.

John McLaughlin

If you have a lead to a translation or an edition for sale that's missing here, please feel free to write me at nuwitaivottsi@yahoo.com or john.mclaughlin@usu.edu.  Make sure you put "LOTR" or "Tolkien" in the subject line--sometimes I get overzealous in deleting mail that I don't recognize.  But then don't we all?