The Fellowship of the Ring

Frodo Baggins inherits a plain gold ring from his cousin Bilbo along with Bag End itself, and lives with it for seventeen years before the wizard Gandalf confirms what he has come to suspect: it is the One Ring, forged by the Dark Lord Sauron to rule all the other rings of power, thought lost for centuries and now, through Bilbo and now Frodo, found again. Gandalf sends Frodo fleeing the Shire with his gardener Sam Gamgee and his cousins Merry and Pippin, pursued by the Nazgul, undead riders serving Sauron, and the group is nearly caught before a Ranger named Strider guides them safely to the elven refuge of Rivendell. There the Council of Elrond decides the Ring cannot be hidden or used, only destroyed, in the fires of Mount Doom where it was made, and nine companions, four hobbits, Strider, revealed as Aragorn, heir to a lost kingdom, the elf Legolas, the dwarf Gimli, the wizard Gandalf and the man Boromir, set out together as the Fellowship of the Ring. Gandalf falls into shadow fighting a Balrog in the mines of Moria, seemingly to his death, and the remaining company presses on through the elven wood of Lothlorien before Boromir, overcome by the Ring's pull, tries to take it from Frodo by force at Amon Hen. Frodo, shaken, decides to go on to Mordor alone rather than risk what the Ring is already doing to his companions; Sam, refusing to be left behind, follows him into the reeds, and the book ends with the Fellowship broken and the quest continuing with only two of its nine members.

Tolkien writes at a scale and pace almost nobody else attempted in 1954, unhurried, densely built out of invented histories, songs and languages that mostly exist offstage, and the book asks real patience of a reader before its plot gathers speed; the same density that some early reviewers found tedious is exactly what later readers came to treasure it for.

Tolkien had originally written the whole work as one continuous book, and it was his publisher, wary of a novel that size and of the high cost of typesetting against modest expected sales, who split it into three volumes and pushed Tolkien, against his own wishes, to invent a separate title for each one.