THE HALL OF FIRE :

BOOKS BY TOLKIEN

These Wikipedia entries have been selected to help answer the most common questions about Tolkien's works.

THE HOBBIT
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, better known by its abbreviated title The Hobbit, is a fantasy novel and children's book by J.R.R. Tolkien. 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. The book remains popular and is recognized as a classic in children's literature.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS
The Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy epic written by philologist and University of Oxford professor J.R.R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's earlier, less complex children's fantasy novel The Hobbit (1937), but eventually developed into a much larger work. It was written in stages between 1937 and 1949, much of it during the Second World War. It is the second best-selling novel ever written, with over 150 million copies sold.

THE SILMARILLION
The Silmarillion is a collection of J.R.R. Tolkien's mythopoeic works, edited and published posthumously by his son Christopher Tolkien in 1977, with assistance from Guy Gavriel Kay, who later became a noted fantasy writer. The Silmarillion, along with J.R.R. Tolkien's other works, forms a comprehensive, yet incomplete, narrative that describes the universe of Middle-earth within which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place.

UNFINISHED TALES
Unfinished Tales (full title Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth) is a collection of stories and essays by J.R.R. Tolkien that were never completed during his lifetime, but were edited by his son Christopher Tolkien and published in 1980.

THE CHILDREN OF HÚRIN
The Children of Húrin is an epic fantasy novel which forms the completion of a tale by J.R.R. Tolkien. He wrote the original version of the story in the late 1910s, revised it several times later, but did not complete it before his death in 1973. His son, Christopher Tolkien, edited the manuscripts to form a consistent narrative, and published it in 2007 as an independent work.

THE HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH
The History of Middle-earth is a 12-volume series of books published from 1983 through to 1996 that collect and analyse material relating to the fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien, compiled and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien. Some of the content consists of earlier versions of already published works, while other portions are new material. These books are extremely detailed, often analysing a scrap of paper to provide the full evolution of two or even three different versions of a passage that were rewritten over each other. Christopher Tolkien has documented the history of the writing of the Middle-earth stories in as much detail as his father documented the fictional history of Middle-earth itself. However, numerous unpublished texts are still thought to exist in the Bodleian and Marquette University libraries and in other papers held by individuals or organizations, such as the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship.

FARMER GILES OF HAM
"Farmer Giles of Ham" is a Medieval fable written by J.R.R. Tolkien in 1937 and published in 1949. The story describes the encounters between Farmer Giles and a wily dragon named Chrysophylax, and how Giles manages to use these to rise from humble beginnings to rival the king of the land. It is cheerfully anachronistic and light-hearted, set in a fantasy Great Britain of long ago, with mythical creatures, medieval knights, and primitive firearms. It is only tangentially connected with the author's Middle-earth legendarium: both were originally intended as essays in "English mythology".

For other works by, including The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, as well as those collected in Tales from the Perilous Realm, please pay a visit to Wikipedia's Middle-earth Portal.