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Allen & Unwin books

  • The Monsters and the Critics, and Other EssaysThe Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays arrived in bookshops in 1983, nearly a decade after J. R. R. Tolkien's death.
  • The Lord of the RingsThe Lord of the Rings began with a birthday party. Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit celebrating his eleventy-first year, slips on a magic ring and vanishes from his…
  • The HobbitThe Hobbit, or There and Back Again begins with a sentence Tolkien wrote on a blank exam paper one day in the early 1930s: "In a hole in the ground there…
  • The Adventures of Tom BombadilThe Adventures of Tom Bombadil arrived in 1962 as something unusual in the world of Tolkien publishing: not a novel, not a history of Middle-earth, but a…
  • The SilmarillionThe Silmarillion begins not with a hero or a quest, but with silence, and then a song. Before the world existed, before stars or seas or the first living…
  • The Two TowersIn January 1954, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote that he was "not at all happy about the title The Two Towers." The book was the second volume of The Lord of the…
  • The Return of the KingThe Return of the King arrived in United Kingdom bookshops on the 20th of October 1955. It was the third and final volume of J. R. R.
  • The Fellowship of the RingThe Fellowship of the Ring arrived in British bookshops on the 29th of July 1954, the first of three volumes that together would become one of the most…
  • Tree and LeafTree and Leaf is a small anthology by J. R. R. Tolkien published in 1964, and it gathers two pieces that Tolkien had written years before its release.
  • The Road Goes Ever OnThe Road Goes Ever On began not in a studio or a concert hall, but in a garden. In Priscilla Tolkien's garden, Donald Swann sat at a piano and performed his…
  • Farmer Giles of HamFarmer Giles of Ham begins not with a hero, but with a fat, red-bearded man named Aegidius Ahenobarbus Julius Agricola de Hammo, who is very much enjoying a…
  • Allen & UnwinAllen & Unwin began with a transaction that would reshape English-language publishing for the next century. On the 4th of August 1914, Stanley Unwin…