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The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy

The Lord of the Rings is an epic high fantasy saga by the British author J. R. R. Tolkien, his most popular work and a sequel to his popular fantasy novel, The Hobbit. The Lord of the Rings was written during World War II and originally published in three volumes in 1954 and 1955. It is widely considered to be one of the finest examples of twentieth-century literature.

Although a major work in itself, The Lord of the Rings is merely the last movement of a larger mythological cycle which Tolkien called his legendarium. The action is mainly set in what is conceived to be the lands of the real Earth inhabited by humanity but placed in a fictional time. Tolkien called this setting by a modern English rendering of the Old English Middangeard: Middle-earth.

Despite its popularity, Tolkien did not consider The Lord of the Rings his magnum opus; he bestowed that honour upon The Silmarillion. Whereas The Lord of the Rings is a story and literary venture, The Silmarillion is the basis of an entire legendarium, which provides the historical and linguistic context for the more popular work and his constructed languages.

Three film adaptations have been made of the story told by the books: the first, by animator Ralph Bakshi, was released in 1978 (as the first part of what was originally intended to be a two-part adaptation of the story); the second, a 1980 television special; and the third, director Peter Jackson's film trilogy, released in three installments in 2001, 2002, and 2003. There are also two Collectible Card Games and multiple video games that take place in the Middle-earth.

Back story
The back story begins thousands of years before the action in the trilogy, with the rise of the eponymous Lord of the Rings, the Dark Lord Sauron, a malevolent incarnated spiritual being who possesses great supernatural powers and is the ruler of the dreaded realm of Mordor.

At the end of the First Age of Middle-earth, Sauron survives the catastrophic defeat and exile...