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Hardcover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. First edition. 8vo. [4], 7-365, [3] pp. Navy blue cloth with gold lettering on the spine; navy blue topstain. Price of £4.95 on the front flap of the dust jacket. Illustrated with a fold-out map in the rear and with a plate printed in red and black. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Hammond and Anderson A15b. Per Hammond and Anderson, the British domestic and export editions were published simultaneously. This is the first British trade edition, the typos in the text as called for by Hammond and Anderson. A lovely copy of this important work by a most influential and beloved writer of fantasy.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE FRSL (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Pembroke College, both at the University of Oxford. He then moved within the same university to become the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College and held these positions from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis, a co-member of the informal literary discussion group The Inklings. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.

After Tolkien’s death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father’s extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and, within it, Middle–earth. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings.

While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused him to be popularly identified as the “father” of modern fantasy literature—or, more precisely, of high fantasy.