The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)

by J.R.R. Tolkien

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is often erroneously called a trilogy, when it is in fact a single novel, consisting of six books plus appendices, sometimes published in three volumes.

As part of the release of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, celebrated authors (and huge fans) of the books are sharing their exclusive annotations with readers. We hope you enjoy these notes from Ken Liu, a Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy recipient. Thanks for stopping by my notes on The Fellowship of the Ring. It's a real joy and honor for me to make these notes, for Tolkien has been a great inspiration for my own epic fantasy novels. Like The Lord of the Rings, the Dandelion Dynasty was also heavily inspired by Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon literature in general (I absolutely love kennings). Also like The Lord of the Rings, at least parts of the Dandelion Dynasty were written as a single novel, and only forced to become multiple volumes due to the limitations of the technology of bookmaking. There's a lot more in this introductory note where I feel sympathy for Tolkien, but these hints will suffice. Countless writers have been drawn into epic fantasy by Tolkien, who virtually single-handedly created the modern genre with this magnum opus. Everyone who writes in epic fantasy, myself included, has had to write in Tolkien's shadow, to struggle with and against him. Love him or hate him, he is the one author we cannot bypass. Even if you haven't read him, you know what he is about. How many writers can claim that? All great epics are written for their time as well as for eternity. Over time, as Tolkien's language grows archaic and recedes from the ever-renewed tides of the evolving vernacular, what was timely about The Lord of the Rings also fades, leaving behind only the lasting, the ruined meditation on the nature of humanity. The Lord of the Rings will then share the fate of Beowulf, the epic that inspired it, and become itself an original that can only be understood through imitations and translations. May we all who write be so lucky.