Tolkien By The Numbers

Number of works published during his lifetime:

9

The Hobbit
Leaf by Niggle
On Faerie Stories
Farmer Giles of Ham
The Homecoming of Beorhnoth
The Lord of the Rings
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil
The Road Goes Ever On
Smith of Wooton Major


Number of posthumous published works to date:

12

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Father Christmas Letters
The Silmarillion
Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien
Unfinished Tales
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien
Finn and Hengest
Mr. Bliss
The Monsters and the Critics
Roverandom
The History of Middle-earth
The Children of Hurin


Number of years Tolkien took to complete The Lord of the Rings:

13


Percentage of profits Tolkien received per his contract with publisher Allen and Unwin:

50 percent after production costs recovered


Number of words in The Lord of the Rings:

600,000 (approximately)


Number of pages in The Lord of the Rings:

998 – actual text only
1,145 – when including a Prologue, six Appendices, an Index, and four maps

(per my current copy: Houghton Mifflin large paperback published just after The Return of the King motion picture)


Geography of Middle-earth (very, very rough estimate):

1,200 miles east-west;
1,150 miles north-south;

1.38 million square miles.
A little more than a third of the contiguous US in area.

Number of languages Tolkien invented:

14

(Arguably as high as 21 depending on what one defines as a “language”)


Number of poems that appear in The Lord of the Rings:

50-60, depending on one’s definition of “poem”

The longest – Bilbo’s poem of Eärendil – comprises 124 lines in length


Number of dreams that appear in the text:

8 (all but 2 dreamed by the four principal hobbits)


Timeframe of Tolkien’s mythos:

Something on the order of 10,000 years, though who can put a number on the exact length of the First Age?


[Hobbits, Elves, and Wizards by Michael N. Stanton is the source for a little more than half of these statistics.]