Abstract

Hope is arguably the linchpin virtue of The Lord of the Rings. In this essay, as part of a larger project intended to establish this claim, I take up Appendix A.I.v to The Lord of the Rings, the relatively self-contained “Part of the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen.” Through a close study of the drafts for this section available in the Tolkien Archives at Marquette University, only some of which have been previously published in The Peoples of Middle-earth, as well as one discovery in the Bodleian, I demonstrate that this short text, one of the very last that Tolkien prepared and finished for The Lord of the Rings, evinces a gradually increasing emphasis on the importance of hope to the narrative project as a whole. I argue, finally, that this suggests the need for both increased scrutiny of the nature and development of hope in The Lord of the Rings and the broader legendarium, as well as a return to the manuscripts for in-depth analysis of the development of (other) particular issues and themes in the texts.