A vast manuscript, one keystroke at a time
Typing with two index fingers is often called “hunt-and-peck”: instead of assigning different fingers to different parts of the keyboard, the typist finds and strikes each key individually. It can be slower than touch-typing, which relies on practiced finger positions—but it still lets a writer work at length. Tolkien’s method makes the physical scale of producing a long manuscript easier to picture: each sentence had to be entered key by key.
Why revisions multiply the work
A book’s final page count hides the labor that came before it. When a writer changes a passage, the change may affect nearby wording, continuity, or later scenes. A manuscript can therefore go through repeated rounds of alteration, with material being rewritten rather than simply added once. That is why the effort behind a finished work cannot be measured by its published words alone.
For Tolkien, the two-finger method was part of the practical work of turning an imagined world into a manuscript. The memorable detail is not just that the trilogy was long: it is that every finished page emerged through a process that was slow, physical, and revised along the way.
