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Middle-earth / Lord of the Rings

edited 2026-05-22

A complete reading and viewing order for J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth — Tolkien's five lifetime publications (The Hobbit, the three Lord of the Rings volumes, and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil), the five Christopher Tolkien-edited Great Tales (The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien, The Fall of Gondolin), the post-Christopher continuations (The Nature of Middle-earth, The Fall of Númenor), Peter Jackson's six theatrical Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated theatrical, the Rankin/Bass 1977 Hobbit and 1980 Return of the King TV specials, Kenji Kamiyama's 2024 The War of the Rohirrim, and Amazon's The Rings of Power. Both publication-order and in-universe chronological reading and viewing orders.

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Tags · [lifetime-canon][christopher-edited][post-christopher][jackson-lotr][jackson-hobbit][rankin-bass][bakshi][war-of-the-rohirrim][rings-of-power]
page order
books12 items · 12 unwatched
01NOVEL
1977Edited by Christopher Tolkien with the assistance of Guy Gavriel Kay and published 15 September 1977. A compilation of five connected works…
365 pp
02COLLECTION
2017Edited by Christopher Tolkien and published in 2017. Rather than synthesise a single text, Christopher arranges the multiple successive vers…
297 pp
03NOVEL
2007Edited by Christopher Tolkien from his father's manuscripts and published 17 April 2007 — the first standalone presentation of one of the th…
320 pp
04COLLECTION
2018Edited by Christopher Tolkien and published in 2018 — the last of his standalone Great Tales editions and the latest of Tolkien's narrative…
304 pp
05COLLECTION
2022Edited by Brian Sibley and illustrated by Alan Lee, published 10 November 2022 by HarperCollins. Rather than introduce previously unpublishe…
296 pp
06COLLECTION
1980Edited and published by Christopher Tolkien in 1980. A collection of narratives and essays Tolkien left in various states of completion at h…
472 pp
07COLLECTION
2021Edited by Carl F. Hostetter and published in 2021 — the first major Middle-earth volume since Christopher Tolkien's death and described by r…
464 pp
08NOVEL
1937Published in the United Kingdom on 21 September 1937 by George Allen & Unwin. The hobbit Bilbo Baggins is recruited by the wizard Gandalf to…
310 pp
09NOVEL
1954The first volume of The Lord of the Rings, published 29 July 1954. Sixty years after Bilbo's return from the Lonely Mountain, his heir Frodo…
423 pp
10NOVEL
1954The second volume of The Lord of the Rings, published 11 November 1954. The Fellowship's broken halves drive parallel narratives across two…
352 pp
11NOVEL
1955The third and final volume of The Lord of the Rings, published 20 October 1955. The armies of Gondor, Rohan, and the Free Peoples converge o…
416 pp
12COLLECTION
1962Published in 1962 by George Allen & Unwin. A collection of sixteen poems framed as translations from the Red Book of Westmarch — the in-univ…
80 pp