Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is the fantasy series to rule all fantasy series: everything that came after, from Harry Potter to Homestuck, has been shaped and influenced by Tolkien. Sir Terry Pratchett said it best: “J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints.”
But if you want to get into Tolkien’s work, it can be a little bit daunting. His work’s known for being incredibly dense, full of long descriptions and nigh-Biblical prose. This guide will give you a reading order for Lord of the Rings that lets you tackle it at a steady pace. (You will also find a quick guide to Tolkien’s other relevant work as a little bonus section at the end.)
Now that we have the quick list, let’s go over each book in detail, as well as why it might be worth your time. Remember to check the section at the end for some recommendations on Tolkien’s other works relevant to the series.
The Hobbit is the story of a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins who gets roped into a grand quest to help a group of dwarves reclaim their ancestral home. He becomes a burglar, deals with a dragon, and wins a very curious magic ring in a riddle game.
Tolkien wrote The Hobbit for his own children and never expected it’d get as popular as it inevitably did. It was an instant classic and has never been out of print.
The Hobbit makes a great start to any reading order for Lord of the Rings. It’s a prequel, it’s got some of the simplest writing of all Tolkien’s work, and while the story stands alone, it sets up some important elements of the books to come.
This is what you’re here for – if you’re looking at an article about a reading order for Lord of the Rings, you’re probably at least familiar with the movies.
The Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy epic about the Free Peoples of the world coming together to destroy the Dark Lord Sauron’s One Ring. A hobbit named Frodo Baggins has to take on the dangerous task of carrying the Ring… and throwing it into the fires of Mount Doom.
It was originally meant to be bound in one volume, and sold together with The Silmarillion. But thanks to paper shortages after WWII (and The Silmarillion being incredibly dense), the work had to be split into three volumes.
The Fellowship of the Ring is the first book in the series, covering the start of Frodo’s quest to get the One Ring to Rivendell and the Council of Elrond that decides its fate.
The Two Towers is the second book in the Lord of the Rings reading order; it starts after the Fellowship breaks apart, and bounces back and forth between three groups that have gone their separate ways.
The Return of the King is the final volume of the Lord of the Rings, about the final battle against Sauron, Frodo’s attempt to destroy the ring, and what comes after.
At the back of Return of the King, you’ll find several dozen appendices.
Some of them are bits of narrative that couldn’t fit into the main book: the love story between Aragorn and Arwen, which mostly takes place off camera. Others are worldbuilding minutiae: the calendars and timeline of MIddle-Earth; a bunch of notes on how the (fictional) translator of The Lord of the Rings translated the work into English, and so many hobbit family trees.
If you’re a fan of LOTR: Rings of Power, you’ll definitely want to check the Appendices out – they’re where most of the show’s worldbuilding and story details come from.
Congratulations! You’ve finished The Lord of the Rings. This is where most readers will want to stop. But if you enjoyed the Appendices, if you like Tolkein’s worldbuilding, or if you want to know how The Lord of the Rings was created, there’s so much more to explore here.
Bilbo’s Last Song is … exactly what it sounds like. It’s a short poem, a set of elegiac couplets, about Bilbo Baggins sailing West (as a metaphor for dying). It’s one of the last things Tolkien wrote before his death, and it shows – but it’s a good capstone to his life’s work.
You can usually find this as a picture book, with gorgeous illustrations by Pauline Baynes (who’s best known for illustrating the Narnia series).
Unfinished Tales is a compilation of works that Tolkien left, well, unfinished. Christopher Tolkien warns that the work will be “unrewarding” if you haven’t read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which is why this is so much lower in the reading order – it’s not for a Tolkien newbie. But it’s a little more accessible than The Silmarillion, and many of the stories are more directly connected to The Lord of the Rings.
One standout in Unfinished Tales is The Quest of Erebor, a retelling of The Hobbit from Gandalf’s perspective. Peter Jackson used The Quest of Erebor to enrich the later Hobbit movies, slipping elements in to show how “the quest had to succeed, or the actions described in The Lord of the Rings could not have occurred.”
After Tolkien died, his son Christopher went through his notes about the Legendarium. Together with fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay, he pieced together the Silmarillion, which is a compilation of the stories Tolkien wrote about the history of the elves, dwarves, and men of Middle-Earth.
It helps to think of The Silmarillion as the elf Bible. It’s incredibly dense and weighty; there’s no hobbitry in there to smooth things over or provide comic relief. You get a real sense of scale and history from it, and once you’ve read it, characters like Galadriel and Sauron seem much deeper and more complicated.
Christopher Tolkien also released three stand-alone versions of some of the stories within The Silmarillion: The Children of Húrin, Beren and Luthien, and The Fall of Gondolin. If you’re finding the Silmarillion a bit dry, try picking up one of the stand-alone versions and seeing if it grabs you.
If you enjoyed the Silmarillion and want more, you’re in luck: Christopher Tolkien is indefatigable and put together even more of his father’s notes…
This is a nine-book series for Tolkien superfans. If you want to know every detail of how Tolkien built his Legendarium over time – how Sauron turned from a giant evil cat to the Dark Lord we love to hate, how Aragorn was originally a hobbit named Trotter, or how The Lord of the Rings evolved from being a children’s book to being the epic we know today – pick these up. They’re incredibly dense, full of footnotes, and are a great example of Tolkien’s writing process.
There are several other works by Tolkien that are connected to the Legendarium that you might want to read:
There’s even more Tolkien to read if you’re interested in his medieval scholarship or his non-LOTR fantasy – but that’s another story for another time.
For now, you’ve got more than enough Tolkien. Go forth, and confidently read The Lord of the Rings!
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Beyond Hogwarts is a site primarily about the Wizarding World, including the Harry Potter franchise and Fantastic Beasts but also covers a wide variety of other series including The Lord of the Rings.
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