The Lord of the Rings
The most influential fantasy work ever written and among the most-read novels of the twentieth century: the genre's commercial category, quest architecture and worldbuilding standard all descend from it.
Book Entry · Fantasy
What is The Hobbit about?
Bilbo Baggins of Bag End, a hobbit of impeccable respectability, is ambushed over tea by thirteen dwarves and a wizard, and contracted — as burglar — for the recovery of the Lonely Mountain's treasure from the dragon Smaug. The road provides trolls, goblins, eagles, Beorn, Mirkwood's spiders and, in a dark lakeside cave, a riddle game with a creature called Gollum over a small gold ring whose significance its finder will spend decades not suspecting. Bilbo leaves home a grocer's notion of a person and returns a poet's: the prototype of fantasy's most durable arc. Written for Tolkien's children; conquered everyone else's.
Why it matters
The gateway to modern fantasy — perhaps a hundred million copies — whose unexpected demand for a sequel produced The Lord of the Rings; Peter Jackson's trilogy stretched it to cinematic breaking point, the book remains unstretched.
Where does it sit in the series?
The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion and the wider legendarium: Tolkien's life-work, the invented mythology that founded modern fantasy.
In the Guide from Middle-earth:
- The Hobbit (1937)
- The Lord of the Rings (1954)
- The Silmarillion (1977)
Read next
The Amber Spyglass
Whitbread Book of the Year 2001 — the first children's book ever to take the overall prize — and the most theologically audacious bestseller in the YA canon; the trilogy's capstone and lightning rod alike.
Charmed Life
Guardian Award winner and the launch of Chrestomanci: the wittiest of the great British children's fantasy sequences and a visible ancestor of the boarding-school-magic boom that followed two decades later.