Happy Hobbit Day!
September 22 is apparently the shared birthday of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. I wonder how old they would be.
Today is also a good excuse to examine the index for the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy. I was quite surprised to notice, a couple of years ago, that my omnibus edition has an index. Thanks to a comment from a colleague, I have learned that the box set also comes with an index, or at least some of the box sets do.
To back up a moment, and briefly recap, last month I reviewed an online index for The Wheel of Time series. The indexing issues I raised for fiction included spoilers, the scope of the index, locators, and differentiation, for example if the reader has forgotten which is a person, place, or thing. I will not repeat my full discussion of these issues in this blog post, but I will be examining this index with those issues in mind. So, on to the LOTR’s index.
I am curious to know when this index was originally written. My omnibus edition is from 1995, though the copyright page states that the three volumes were first published together in 1968. Does the index extend that far back? I was able to find a copy of the index in a box set on Amazon, using their Look Inside feature. That version is from a mass market paperback edition from Del Ray, apparently from 1986. I do not know if that index is the one reproduced in other box sets as well. In any case, the two indexes are extremely similar. The box set edition appears to have been shortened, which I think makes it less comprehensive and useful, but otherwise I am willing to believe that it is simply a shortened version of the original. In this review, I will mostly be commenting on the longer version found in the omnibus edition.
The index itself is actually a set of four indexes. There is an index for songs and verses; persons, beasts, and monsters; places; and things. There is a fifth section in the box set, with the title of “Supplement: Persons, Places and Things appearing only in Songs and Poems,” only a page long. I am not sure why this fifth index is included, as it is very specific. What audience or need is it seeking to meet? Otherwise, I think splitting the index is a helpful decision on the part of the indexer. It directly addresses the issue of differentiation, and of informing readers what kind of entry they are looking at. Splitting the index also means that each section is not too long, which I think also makes the index easier to search.
Splitting the index also speaks to the scope of the index, which is what does the index cover. Related to scope is also the use, or not, of subheadings, which also leads to the issue of spoilers. Can we get a sense of the story from the index entries? In this index, the focus of the index is on the tangible. As far as I can tell, there are no conceptual entries, nor do the entries give a sense of plot. There are a few subheadings, but they are mostly of alternative names or terms, such as “the Grey” or “Stormcrow” for Gandalf. I am glad that these alternative terms are included so that the reader can find all of the relevant entries (and I noticed that several of them were removed in the box set edition), but these don’t tell us much about the character, place, or thing.
Also on scope—and an aspect of this index that I find frustrating—is that the index does not attempt to be comprehensive. The places index, in particular, has a headnote explaining that in most cases only the first mention is indexed, except for where the indexer thought there were other significant mentions. In the box set edition, the headnote actually admits, “This [index] is rather more arbitrary than the last.” The headnote for the persons, beasts, and monsters index simply tells us that “references are selective” (though this headnote is missing from the box set). Still, there are far more locators in the persons index than for places, giving me some confidence that I will at least find all of the major scenes or chapters for a character. I do not know why the same was not done for places. For the things index, there is no headnote, and relatively few locators. This is also the section that appears to have been shortened the most between the two editions. The songs and verses index is short, split between first lines and titles, and seems comprehensive. Overall, it seems like each section was given different treatment, without a lot of explanation to the reader as to why. This makes me doubt the usefulness and reliability of the index. Can I trust that I am being directed to all of the relevant entries? Part of the indexing process is determining what is relevant for the reader, especially if there is a space constraint, so I do not want to fault the indexer for making decisions that we all have to make. In the absence of more information, though, the discrepancies do seem arbitrary, which is not the impression that an index should give.
The locators are also worth commenting on. With no subheadings to indicate plot, there are long strings of undifferentiated locators. These are usually not ideal, but given that this index is trying to avoid spoilers and is only trying to direct readers to the relevant pages, I think the undifferentiated locators are understandable.
One aspect I found interesting were the extremely long page ranges for main characters. Locators for Frodo, for example, included 21-145 passim, 148-86 passim, 190-209 passim. The term passim, not commonly used, is meant to indicate that the subject is discussed throughout the range, but not necessarily on every page or in a continuous discussion. I think the use here is unnecessary as the reader will probably figure that out from the ranges. Still, these ranges are an interesting solution for how to index main characters who are the focus of the book. The ranges allow those entries to be relatively short, compared to how much of the book the locators cover.
The locators also, of course, have to be changed for the different editions. For the box set, the index seems to only appear in the third book, The Return of the King, and locators include the volume number, so readers know which book in the trilogy to refer back to. I see value in having the (mostly) same index across all editions, so readers will find the same kinds of information regardless of the edition they are using. It must be a tedious task, though, for whoever given the job of adjusting the locators for each new edition.
All in all, I think that the LOTR index is decent. Its best feature is having separate indexes for the different types of content. The part of me that likes to be organized and thorough wishes that the index was more comprehensive, in both entries and number of references picked up. At the very least, a longer headnote would be helpful to explain the differences between the sections and what we can expect to find. I also wonder how this index would be different if the plot was at least hinted at, but I respect the decision to not include spoilers. For the reader, I think this index is certainly a vast improvement over having no index, and I am grateful for whoever had the foresight to create it and to keep it in publication.
My apologies for irregular blogging over the last couple of months. I have had a lot of work this summer, which is continuing into the fall. More to the point, I’ve been away for about a week for each of the last two months, and I have another trip planned starting next week. I don’t usually stagger my holidays like this, and while I have enjoyed the people and places my wife and I have visited, I have also found it difficult to maintain routines in this pattern of intense periods of work interspersed by travel. I look forward to returning to a more settled schedule, including more blogging, when I return in October.