The Hobbit

Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit who prizes his quiet home and his regular meals above any adventure, is talked into joining thirteen dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield on a quest to reclaim their mountain home and its treasure from the dragon Smaug, all at the prompting of the wizard Gandalf, who names Bilbo the company's burglar. The journey east carries them through trolls, goblin tunnels, and a fateful riddle contest in the dark with a creature named Gollum, from whom Bilbo wins a small gold ring that turns out to make its wearer invisible. Once the company reaches the Lonely Mountain, Bilbo scouts Smaug's lair alone and steals a single cup, provoking the dragon into a rage that sends him to destroy nearby Lake Town instead, where the archer Bard kills him with an arrow aimed at a single bare patch in his armored belly. With Smaug dead, dwarves, elves and men nearly go to war over the treasure until goblins and wolves attack all three at once; the Battle of Five Armies that follows kills Thorin, who reconciles with Bilbo just before he dies, and Bilbo returns home with only a modest portion of the treasure, wealthy enough but glad simply to be back.

Tolkien writes for children without writing down to them, letting genuine danger and real death sit alongside comic songs and Bilbo's fussy, very English discomfort at being swept out of his own kitchen. It reads quickly and warmly for most of its length, building steadily toward a darker, more mythic register by its final chapters that points directly ahead to the larger book Tolkien would eventually write as its sequel.

Tolkien, an Oxford scholar of Old English and Norse literature, built the book's world out of that scholarship, and Allen and Unwin's first print run of fifteen hundred copies in September 1937 sold out by Christmas. He later revised the riddle contest chapter substantially once The Lord of the Rings required Gollum's ring to be something far more dangerous than the invisibility charm it starts out as here.