The Fellowship of the Ring, first volume (1954) in the trilogy that forms the famed fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, whose academic grounding in Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and Norse mythology helped shape his fictional world. The three-part work, set in the land of Middle-earth, forms a sequel to Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) and constitutes one of the most successful novels in publishing history. The epic tale continued in The Two Towers (1954) and The Return of the King (1955).