The Fellowship of the Ring

The Fellowship of the Ring is the first of three volumes of the epic novel The Lord of the Rings by the English author J. R. R. Tolkien. It is followed by The Two Towers and The Return of the King. The action takes place in the fictional universe of Middle-earth. The book was first published on 29 July 1954 in the United Kingdom. The volume consists of a foreword, in which the author discusses his writing of The Lord of the Rings, a prologue titled "Concerning Hobbits, and other matters", and the main narrative in Book I and Book II. Scholars and critics have remarked the narrative structure of the first part of the volume, which involves five "Homely Houses", the comfortable stays alternating with episodes of danger. Different reasons for the structure have been proposed, including deliberate construction of a cosy world, laboriously groping for a story, and Tolkien's work habits, involving continual rewriting. Two major chapters, "The Shadow of the Past" and "The Council of Elrond", stand out from the rest in not consisting of a narrative of action centred on the Hobbits, but of exceptionally long flashback narrated by a wise old character. The volume was in the main praised by reviewers and authors including W. H. Auden and Naomi Mitchison on its publication, though the critic Edmund Wilson attacked it in a review entitled "Oo, Those Awful Orcs!". The two flashback chapters have attracted scholarly discussion; Tolkien called "The Shadow of the Past" the "crucial chapter" as it changes the tone of the book, and lets both the protagonist Frodo and the reader know that there will be a quest to destroy the Ring. "The Council of Elrond" has been called a tour de force, presenting a culture-clash of the modern with the ancient. Title and publication