Summary

No work of fiction has a greater claim to shaping modern fantasy than J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The sprawling trilogy, not to mention Tolkien’s other works in the wider Middle-earth mythos like The Hobbit , helped define the genre as it exists today, influencing generations of authors who embraced its conventions or deliberately challenged them. However, Tolkien didn’t invent fantasy.

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