John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a writer, poet, philologist, Oxford University professor, and the founder of modern fantasy. In 1937, The Hobbit was written, and in the mid-1950s, the three books of The Lord of the Rings were published, telling the story of Middle-earth—a world inhabited by representatives of magical races with a complex culture, history, and mythology.
In the following years, these novels were translated into all the world's languages, adapted for film, animation, audio plays, theater, computer games, comics, and spawned a multitude of imitations and parodies.
For the first time with illustrations by J.R.R. Tolkien himself!