III. A. Note on References

There is a certain amount of cross-referencing among the questions on both the FAQ and the LessFAQ lists. Any questions so referred to are specified by the list, section, and question number. Thus, the first question in the Hobbit section of the FAQ, "Were Hobbits a sub-group of Humans?" would be referenced as (FAQ, Hobbits, 1). Note that the section "Tolkien And His Work" is referred to merely as "Tolkien" and the section "General History of Middle-earth" is referred to merely as "General". E.g. the question "Who was J.R.R. Tolkien anyway?" is (FAQ, Tolkien, 1) and the question "What exactly happened at the end of the First Age?" is (LessFAQ, General, 1).

Sources for quotations have been provided in the form of volume and page numbers; the specific editions utilized are listed in the next paragraph. For those occasions when the proper edition is not available (and the conversion table below is not applicable) the page numbers have been roughly located according to chapter, sub-section, or appendix, whichever is appropriate. For example, RK, 57-59 (V, 2) refers to pages 57-59 of Return of the King and further locates the pages in chapter 2 of Book V. PLEASE NOTE the distinction in the case of Lord of the Rings between Volumes and Books. LotR is comprised of three Volumes (FR, TT, and RK) and of six Books (I - VI), which are the more natural divisions of the story into six roughly equal parts. There are two Books in each of the Volumes. Other sample references are below.

References to The Hobbit are from the Ballantine paperback (the pagination has been the same since the 60's). All other references are to the HM hardcovers. Sample references follow:


Hobbit, 83 (Ch V)  ==   Hobbit, chapter V

RK, 408 (App F, I, "Of Men", "Of Hobbits")  ==
            p 408 in Part I of Appendix F, the sections
                     entitled "Of Men" and "Of Hobbits"

Silm, 57 (Ch V)  ==  Silmarillion, chapter V
    (BoLT and _The Annotated Hobbit_ treated similarly)

UT, 351 (Three, IV, iii)  ==  Unfinished Tales,
                Part Three, Chapter IV, sub-section iii
                      (the Biography treated similarly)

Letters, 230 (#178)  ==  letter number 178.

RtMe, 53-54 (3, "Creative anachronisms")  ==
                The Road to Middle-earth, in Chapter 3,
                    sub-section "Creative anachronisms"

III. B. Conversion Table

In The Atlas of Middle-earth, Karen Wynn Fonstad provided a Houghton-Mifflin-to-Ballantine conversion table, which is reproduced below. The "table" is actually a set of formulae by which HM page numbers may be converted to Ballantine page numbers via arithmetic involving some empirically determined constants. Since these are discrete rather than continuous functions the results may be off by a page or so.

[NOTE: in the Fall of 1993, Ballantine issued a new edition of the mass market paperback of LotR in which the text has been re-set, thereby changing the page on which any given quote is located. Thus, the following table will no longer work with the latest printings, which may be identified by the change in the color of the covers (the pictures are unaltered): in the previous set of printings all the covers were black; in the new set FR is green, TT is purple, and RK is red.]

   HM Page        Subtract    Divide By      Add
-------------     --------    ---------    -------
FR 10 to 423         9          .818          18
TT 15 to 352        14          .778          16
RK 19 to 311        18          .797          18
RK 313 to 416      312          .781         386
 H 9 to 317          8         1.140          14
Silm 15 to 365      14          .773           2

Reference: Atlas, p. 191 (first edition), p. 192 (revised edition)

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