What is the order of the Lord of the Rings?

Ever since they were published in the 1950s, The Lord of the Rings books by J.R.R. Tolkien have been the seminal fantasy text of the last century. Peter Jackson made them into hugely successful movies, and they influenced everything from The Wheel of Time to Game of Thrones.

If you’d like to read them for yourself, you may wonder what order you’re supposed to tackle them in. The good news is that it’s very simple. If you want to read The Lord of the Rings and nothing more, here’s what order to read them in:

1. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
3. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Those are the three main books of the trilogy, all neatly laid out. Together they tell the tale of the end of the Third Age, when Frodo, Aragorn and others stood against the might of Sauron.

What is the order of The Silmarillion?

That said, Tolkien wrote more books set in Middle-earth, including some that he never published but which were later edited and released by his son Christopher. If you want to really immerse yourself in Middle-earth, here’s your full reading list, in order of when they take place:

1. The Silmarillion
2. The Hobbit
3. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings
4. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
5. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

The bulk of The Silmarillion is set literally thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings, back in the First Age when the elves were just waking up and battling the vile Morgoth — Sauron’s boss — for dominion over Middle-earth.

There are books that go into even more detail on some of the big events of this period, including Beren and Lúthien, The Children of Húrin and The Fall of Gondolin. Skip several thousand years later and we get to The Hobbit, which takes place just a few decades before The Lord of the Rings and involves some of the same characters. And then Unfinished Tales has stories from all over the timeline.

And there you have it. Have fun visiting Middle-earth!

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