The Lord of the Rings

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again is an award-winning children's book and fantasy novel by J. R. R. Tolkien, written in the tradition of the fairy tale. Tolkien wrote the story in the early 1930s to amuse his three sons. It was published on 21 September 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the New York Herald Tribune for best juvenile fiction. More recently, The Hobbit has been recognized as the "Most Important 20th-Century Novel (for Older Readers)" by the children's book magazine Books for Keeps. The book has sold an estimated 100 million copies worldwide since first publication.

The Lord of the Rings is an epic high fantasy novel written by the English academic and philologist J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as merely a sequel to Tolkien's earlier work, The Hobbit, but eventually developed into a much larger tale. It was written in stages between 1937 and 1949, much of it during World War II. Although intended as a single-volume work, it was originally published in three volumes in 1954 and 1955, and it is in this three-volume form that it is popularly known. It has since been reprinted numerous times and translated into many different languages, becoming one of the most popular and influential works in 20th-century literature.