Reading order
| # | Title | Year | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Hobbit | 1937 | Buy |
| 2 | The Fellowship of the Ring | 1954 | Buy |
| 3 | The Two Towers | 1954 | Buy |
| 4 | The Return of the King | 1955 | Buy |
| 5 | The Silmarillion | 1977 | Buy |
Frodo Baggins inherits a ring from his uncle Bilbo. That ring, it turns out, is the One Ring, forged by the Dark Lord Sauron to control all other rings of power. It must be destroyed by throwing it into the fires of Mount Doom, in the heart of Sauron’s realm. Frodo volunteers to carry it.
J.R.R. Tolkien spent over a decade writing The Lord of the Rings, which was published in three volumes between 1954 and 1955. He was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford who had spent years inventing languages and building a mythology for England. The Lord of the Rings gave that mythology its narrative expression.
Tolkien’s influence on fantasy is hard to overstate. The elves, dwarves, and orcs that populate modern fantasy largely follow his templates. The idea of a fully realized secondary world with its own history, languages, and mythology became the genre’s default approach after Tolkien proved it could work.
The Hobbit, published in 1937, is a children’s book that introduces Bilbo and the ring. Start there. The Lord of the Rings follows chronologically. The Silmarillion, published posthumously in 1977, contains the mythology Tolkien worked on his entire adult life. It’s denser than the novels and optional for most readers.
Peter Jackson’s film trilogy (2001-2003) became one of cinema’s greatest achievements, winning 17 Academy Awards including Best Picture. Amazon produced a prequel series, The Rings of Power, beginning in 2022.