Frodo Baggins, bearer of the Ring of Power that would enable the evil Sauron to destroy all that is good in Middle-earth, takes on the task of carrying the Ring to Mount Doom to oversee its destruction.

A collection of Tolkien's unpublished manuscripts dealing with events from the Elder Days of Middle-earth to the end of the War of the Rings.

Never before published in a single volume, Tolkien's four novellas ("Farmer Giles of Ham, Leaf by Niggle, Smith of Wootton Major," and "Roverandom") and one book of poems ("The Adventures of Tom Bombadil") are gathered together in a fully illustrated set.

Kullervo son of Kalervo is perhaps the darkest and most tragic of all J.R.R. Tolkien's characters. "Hapless Kullervo" as Tolkien called him, is a luckless orphan boy with supernatural powers and a tragic destiny. Brought up in the homestead of the dark magician Untamo, who killed his father, kidnapped his mother, and who tries three times to kill him when still a boy, Kullervo is alone save for the love of his twin sister, Wanona, and guarded by the...

J.R.R. Tolkien famously described the Second Age of Middle-earth as a dark age, and not very much of its history is (or need be) told. And for many years readers would need to be content with the tantalizing glimpses of it found within the pages of The Lord of the Rings and its appendices, including the forging of the Rings of Power, the building of the Barad-͠dr and the rise of Sauron. It was not until Christopher Tolkien published The Silmarillion...

Beren was a mortal man, but Lt͠hien was an immortal elf. Her father, a great elvish lord, in deep opposition to Beren, imposed on him an impossible task that he must perform before he might wed Lt͠hien. To show something of the process whereby this legend of Middle-earth evolved over the years, [Christopher Tolkien] has told the story in his father's own words by giving, first, its original form, and then passages in prose and verse from later texts...

Bilbo Baggins, a respectable, well-to-do hobbit, lives comfortably in his hobbit-hole until the day the wandering wizard Gandalf chooses him to share in an adventure from which he may never return.

From the publisher. In this sixth volume of The History of Middle-earth the story reaches The Lord of the Rings. In The Return of the Shadow (an abandoned title for the first volume) Christopher Tolkien describes, with full citation of the earliest notes, outline plans, and narrative drafts, the intricate evolution of The Fellowship of the Ring and the gradual emergence of the conceptions that transformed what J.R.R. Tolkien for long believed would...