MIDDLE-EARTH TIMELINE
Written by three editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner, The Ring of Words looks at Tolkien's first job after the First World War, when he worked as an assistant on the staff of the dictionary.
The book is in three parts. The first tells how Tolkien worked on the OED and which entries he helped to write. The second shows how this work fed his scholarship and his fiction. The third, more than half the volume, studies over a hundred words found in his stories, such as hobbit, ent, mathom or attercop, with their origins and history. It was published by Oxford University Press in 2006.
Three OED editors tell how Tolkien worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, and trace the history of more than a hundred words from his fiction.