The Lord of the Rings

• 1. Introduction

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  The 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 own festivities, leaving his young cousin Frodo with a peculiar inheritance. That small domestic moment sets in motion one of the most widely read works of fiction in history, a novel that has sold over 150 million copies and been translated into at least 38 languages since its first volume appeared on the 29th of July 1954.

  J. R. R. Tolkien, an English scholar and philologist at Oxford, spent more than a decade bringing this story into being, writing it in stages between 1937 and 1949. What his publishers at George Allen & Unwin initially wanted was a simple follow-up to The Hobbit, a children's book from 1937. What they eventually received was something far larger: a six-book narrative of war, loss, and the corrupting pull of power, set in a secondary world called Middle-earth that Tolkien had been quietly building since 1917.

  The questions the book raises are not easily settled. Is it a Christian allegory? A coded account of the First World War? A linguist's meditation on language and myth? Tolkien himself resisted the allegory reading, insisting in the foreword to his revised edition that he preferred "history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers." The answer to what The Lord of the Rings really is may depend on which of its dimensions you approach first.

• 2. A Scholar's Long Gestation

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  In December 1937, Tolkien sat down to write what he called "a new Hobbit." He warned his publishers from the start that he wrote quite slowly, and the years that followed proved him right. Progress stalled repeatedly. He abandoned the manuscript for most of 1943 before restarting it in April 1944, sending chapters to his son Christopher, who was then serving in South Africa with the Royal Air Force.

  The reasons for the slow pace were structural, not just temperamental. Tolkien held a full-time academic position, marked exam papers to supplement his income, and produced many drafts of each section. He was also working outward from an enormous existing mythology. The Lord of the Rings was, in his own description, part of a process he called mythopoeia, the making of myth, that he had been engaged in since 1917 with the material that would eventually become The Silmarillion.

  The original manuscripts grew to 9,250 pages in total. They now reside in the J. R. R. Tolkien Collection at Marquette University. The story was effectively finished by 1948, but Tolkien continued revising earlier sections until 1949. When he finally showed the manuscript to his publishers in 1947, he had spent more time composing it than many novelists spend on an entire career's output.

• 3. The Shape of the Story

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  From the Shire, a rural hobbit land Tolkien modelled on the English countryside, the narrative ranges across an entire invented continent. The quest is deceptively simple in outline: a small group called the Company of the Ring must carry the One Ring to Mount Doom in Mordor, the only place where it can be destroyed, denying its creator, the Dark Lord Sauron, the means to enslave all of Middle-earth.

  Four hobbits stand at the story's centre: Frodo, the Ring-bearer; Sam, his gardener and most loyal companion; and Merry and Pippin, his cousins who insist on joining despite knowing the danger. Around them gather the wizard Gandalf, the ranger Aragorn, who is eventually revealed as the long-lost heir to the throne of Gondor, the elf Legolas, the dwarf Gimli, and the man Boromir. Their unity fractures under the Ring's influence long before the quest is done.

  The narrative is divided into six books, two to each of the three published volumes, and supplemented by extensive appendices covering chronologies, genealogies, and linguistic information. Tolkien used his own maps of Middle-earth as a compositional tool, checking that every journey and every battle fit together correctly in time and space. Over 60 pieces of poetry appear throughout the prose, covering forms from drinking songs to elegies, and scholars have argued that the verse is not ornamental but essential, adding information and revealing character in ways the prose does not.

• 4. Publication and Copyright Battles

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  Tolkien nearly missed publication entirely. A dispute with Allen & Unwin led him to offer the finished manuscript to William Collins in 1950, hoping to publish it alongside The Silmarillion as a two-volume set. Collins's contact Milton Waldman told him The Lord of the Rings "urgently wanted cutting." Tolkien refused to cut it, demanded publication in 1952, and when Collins failed to act, returned to Allen & Unwin.

  Publishing in three volumes rather than one was a financial precaution, not Tolkien's preference. The first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, appeared on the 29th of July 1954; the second, The Two Towers, followed on the 11th of November 1954; and The Return of the King was published on the 20th of October 1955 in the United Kingdom. The three volumes were issued as a boxed set in 1957 and finally appeared as a single volume in 1968, the form Tolkien had always intended.

  In the early 1960s, the American paperback publisher Ace Books published an unauthorized edition, claiming the book was unprotected by US copyright law. Tolkien alerted his readers, who mounted such effective grass-roots pressure that Ace Books withdrew their edition and made a nominal payment to Tolkien. Authorized Ballantine paperbacks followed. The first Ballantine edition, printed in October 1965, sold a quarter of a million copies within ten months. By the 4th of December 1966, it had reached number one on The New York Times Paperback Bestsellers list, a position it held for eight weeks. By 2003, at least 50 million copies had been sold; by 2007, that figure had passed 150 million.

• 5. Sources in Language and War

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  Tolkien's primary inspiration was his profession. As a philologist, he spent his academic life studying Old English literature, and Beowulf stood at the centre of his research and his sense of what literature could do. He was also a gifted linguist who drew on Celtic, Finnish, Slavic, and Greek languages and their accompanying mythologies.

  The Finnish 19th-century epic The Kalevala, compiled by Elias Lönnrot, was among his acknowledged literary sources. The Norse Völsunga saga contributed to the heroic texture of the work, and the Arts and Crafts polymath William Morris was described as a major influence. Even specific place-names in the book have real counterparts: Bag End was the name of his aunt's actual home.

  Personal experience shaped the darker elements. Tolkien fought in the trenches of the First World War, and the militarization and industrialization he witnessed there fed directly into his portrayal of Sauron's forces. He described the Orcs as workers who had been tortured and brutalized by war and industry. The English countryside of Worcestershire near Sarehole Mill, where he spent part of his childhood, gave the Shire its texture, while the encroachment of Birmingham's growth onto that landscape contributed to the book's persistent anxiety about the destruction of the rural world.

• 6. Praise, Contempt, and Debate

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  Early reviews split sharply. The Sunday Telegraph called the work "among the greatest works of imaginative fiction of the twentieth century." W. H. Auden, a former pupil of Tolkien's, called it a "masterpiece" and said it surpassed in some respects the achievement of John Milton's Paradise Lost. C. S. Lewis, within Tolkien's literary circle the Inklings, wrote that the book contained "beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron."

  The opposition was equally fierce. In 1955, the Scottish poet Edwin Muir attacked The Return of the King, arguing that all the characters were "boys masquerading as adult heroes" who would "never come to puberty." The following year, the literary critic Edmund Wilson published a review titled "Oo, Those Awful Orcs!", calling the work "juvenile trash" and stating that Tolkien had "little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form." Tolkien complained angrily to his publisher about Muir's review.

  The debate has never fully resolved. Later critics including Judith Shulevitz and Richard Jenkyns found the work pedantic and psychologically thin. Fantasy author Michael Moorcock, in an essay titled "Epic Pooh", argued that the book's worldview was deeply conservative in both its narrative voice and its power structures. Others, among them the philologist Tom Shippey, have analyzed in detail why the literary establishment disliked the book while simultaneously noting its genuine subtlety and the impression of depth it conveys. The book was awarded the International Fantasy Award in 1957 and was named Britain's best-loved novel in the BBC's 2003 Big Read poll.

• 7. Adaptations Across Every Medium

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  In 1955 and 1956, the BBC broadcast a 13-part radio adaptation of the story. In 1981, it produced a new dramatization in 26 half-hour instalments. Before Peter Jackson's films, various filmmakers had considered adapting the book, including Stanley Kubrick, who judged it unfilmable, and Michelangelo Antonioni. Ralph Bakshi made an animated film version in 1978 covering The Fellowship of the Ring and part of The Two Towers; it received mixed reviews. A Soviet live-action adaptation, Khraniteli, aired once in 1991, was thought lost, and was later rediscovered and published online.

  Peter Jackson's live-action trilogy, produced by New Line Cinema and released between 2001 and 2003, became one of the largest commercial and awards successes in film history. The final instalment, The Return of the King, won 11 Academy Awards, making it only the third film alongside Ben-Hur and Titanic to reach that total. All three films received consecutive Best Picture nominations. The final film broke the one-billion-dollar barrier at the box office.

  In 1965, the composer Donald Swann set six poems from the book to music; when he played them for Tolkien, the author suggested that the lament "Namárië" be given a setting reminiscent of plain chant, which Swann accepted. The songs were published in 1967 as The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle. In 1970, the Swedish musician Bo Hansson released an instrumental concept album based on the work, subsequently released internationally in 1972. The Dutch composer Johan de Meij completed his Symphony No. 1 "The Lord of the Rings" in 1988, with five movements named after characters and locations from the book. From September 2022, Amazon has been presenting a multi-season television series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, set during the Second Age of Middle-earth.

• 8. A Genre Remade

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  Gary Gygax, the lead designer of Dungeons & Dragons, acknowledged that he included hobbits (renamed halflings), elves, dwarves, orcs, and dragons in the game's first edition as a deliberate marketing decision, drawing on the popularity the book enjoyed in the 1970s when he was developing the game. Because Dungeons & Dragons went on to shape role-playing video games, the influence of The Lord of the Rings extends indirectly to titles including Dragon Quest, EverQuest, the Warcraft series, and The Elder Scrolls series.

  The Legend of Zelda, which established the action-adventure game genre in the 1980s, was among the games directly inspired by the book. The Harvard Lampoon parody Bored of the Rings, published in 1969, has remained continuously in print and been translated into at least 11 languages. The words "Tolkienian" and "Tolkienesque" entered the Oxford English Dictionary, and fantasy vocabulary Tolkien drew from obscure corners of the language, such as "Orc" and "Warg", became common currency in the genre.

  In 1969, Tolkien sold the merchandising rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit to United Artists for a lump sum of £10,000 plus a 7.5% royalty after costs. United Artists sold those rights in 1976 to the Saul Zaentz Company, which trades as Tolkien Enterprises. The Silmarillion, the companion mythology Tolkien had worked on since 1917 and had always intended to publish alongside The Lord of the Rings, finally appeared after his death, edited by his son Christopher.