Tolkien quote: For not all tears are an evil.
I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil. Gandalf.
#quoting_tolkien is the Tolkienist’s attempt at providing proper quoting procedures when it comes to the life and works of J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion. All quotes will be proof-read and checked with the relevant passages. Because of the large and growing number of different editions of Tolkien’s works title and chapter will be given and additional information where appropriate. If page numbers are given please keep in mind that differences to your edition may occur.
UPDATE. See below.
Please refrain from using major quotes’ websites like BrainyQuotes or Goodreads. They list a large number of misattributed materials and are therefore useless to the average user.
Abbreviations used are.
AI: The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun
ATB: The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and other Verses from the Red Book
AW: Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad
BLS: Bilbo’s Last Song
BMC: Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics
CH: The Children of Húrin
CP: Chaucer as a Philologist
EA: The End of the Third Age (History of Middle-earth 9) Auszug
EW: English and Welsh / Englisch und Walisisch
FC: Letters from Father Christmas
FGH: Farmer Giles of Ham
FH: Finn and Hengest
FS: On Fairy-Stories
GN: Guide to the Names in the Lord of the Rings
GPO: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo
H: The Hobbit
HB: The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son
HH I/II: The History of the Hobbit
L: The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
LB: The Lays of Beleriand (History of Middle-earth 3)
LN: Leaf by Niggle
LotR: The Lord of the Rings
LotR I: The Fellowhip of the Ring. Being the first part of The Lord of the Rings
LotR II: The Two Towers. Being the second part of The Lord of the Rings
LotR III: The Return of the King. Being the third part of The Lord of the Rings
LotR A: The Lord of the Rings. Appendices
Attention: With The Lord of the Rings on Twitter abbreviation will be: “LotR. (# of book in roman numerals), (#of chapter in numerals), e.g. LotR. VI, 9.
LR: The Lost Road and other Writings (History of Middle-earth 5)
LT 1: The Book of Lost Tales 1 (History of Middle-earth 1)
LT 2: The Book of Lost Tales 2 (History of Middle-earth 2)
MB: Mr. Bliss
MC: The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays
ME: A Middle English Vocabulary
MR: Morgoth’s Ring (History of Middle-earth 10)
My: Mythopoeia
OE: The Old English Exodus
OK: Ósanwe-Kenta
P: Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien
PM: The Peoples of Middle-earth (History of Middle-earth 12)
R: Roverandom
RBG: The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor
RGEO: The Road Goes Ever On (with Donald Swann)
RS: The Return of the Shadow (History of Middle-earth 6)
S: Silmarillion
SD: The Sauron Defeated (History of Middle-earth 9)
SGG: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
SM: The Shaping of Middle-earth (History of Middle-earth 4)
SP: Songs for the Philologists
SV: A Secret Vice
SWM: Smith of Wootton Major
SWME: Smith of Wootton Major Essay
TB: On Translating Beowulf
TI: The Treason of Isengard (History of Middle-earth 7)
TL: Tree and Leaf
UT: Unfinished Tales
VA: Valedictory Address
WJ: The War of the Jewels (History of Middle-earth 11)
WR: The War of the Ring (History of Middle-earth 8)
UPDATE 1 I will be using the 50th Anniversary Edition (1st print) by Houghton Mifflin from 2005 for the quotes at @Quoting_Tolkien; A4 according to Hammond/ Scull’s comparison of editions of The Lord of the Rings. I will try and get the ‘more correct’ version but this one will do for now. As they have given no explicit recommendation this should be a good start. Oct 11, 2014.
UPDATE 2 I will no longer be able to pursue this particular project as it has essentially been superseded by the work of James Tauber at Digital Tolkien. Thanks to Search Tolkien we should be able to determine every single J.R.R. Tolkien from his published works in the future. This was meant to be done in combination with the Twitter account Quoting_Tolkien which has lain dormant for years now and I simply have not had the time to follow up on this regularly.
UPDATE 3 Due to Shmeelon Ungolimusk’s behaviour I have discontinued all of the Xitter accounts – except for one. Goodbye, Quoting_Tolkien!
I will very strongly encourage to NOT quote The Lord of the Rings by volume, but to only do it by book (and possibly chapter). Thus LotR III,3 would refer to the chapter “The Uruk-hai” (in the usual three-volume editions, this would be early in the second volume, The Two Towers), while LotR II will refer to book 2 – starting in Rivendell with ‘Many Meetings’ and ending on the slopes of Amon Hen in ‘The Breaking of the Fellowship’.
Yes, I am still thinking of how to do this.
This list of abbreviations is the one used with “Hither Shore”. This is obviously not meant for quotes on the web 🙂
Taking this example I would want to do it as in this picture:
http://instagram.com/p/c_jgxGH9Si/
i.e. J.R.R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King. Book Six. The Grey Havens.
On Twitter, that’s usually _all_ of the tweet, though 😉
I quite agree that it’s confusing, and the lack of consistency between the various journals and publishers does nothing to help things.
Tolkien Studies uses FR, TT, and RK ;Vinyar Tengwar just uses I, II, and III; and the TS style guide recommends chapter names (which also makes it useless where you wish to keep the reference short – LotR “Here Follows a Part of the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen” is just too much bother).
I still think, however, that it’s a problem to refer to the volume, particularly as chapters are numbered within each book, this is the more natural reference to use if you wish to keep it short (I don’t have any of the “standard” editions, so I cannot even provide relevant page numbers).
So, if you wish to keep your references below, say, 12 characters, the only way to achieve that is either by loosing precision or by referring by book and chapter number.
So it would possibly read:
Tolkien. LotR. VI. IX.
Yup, that would be the shortest but still usable.
Doesn’t look as nice as:
Tolkien. LotR. VI. Grey Havens
but with the length of chapter titles such as “Passing of the Grey Company” equalling 27 characters 😉 that won’t make it with a service like Twitter. And there is where a lot of the nonsense is happening.
I could simply restrict myself to quotes from the Hobbit – in that case a lot of this debate would be rather easily settled 😀
Arda Structural Reference Format uses ‘LR 6 IX’, swapping the use of roman and modern numerals, to avoid confusion of book numbers I, II and III with volume numbers.
I haven’t had a look at that site (which is from ancient HTML days) for some time now but your example reference would mean:
Lord of the Rings, Book 6, Chapter IX – and then, if we are really serious about this #23 for 23rd paragraph counting from the start of the chapter, right?
It would be ‘LR 6 IX:89’, as the text is in the 89th paragraph (paragraph, not section) of the chapter, according to the Ardarathorn count of paragraphs [http://www.sociedadtolkien.org/contenidos/ardarathorn/].