How many Lord of the Rings books are there?
Originally, there was just one, but publishers thought the book was too big and split it into a trilogy so that it wouldn’t be too daunting and to make it easier to hold. Tolkien began writing about Middle Earth as bedtime stories for his son. Like so many children’s authors, such as Lewis Carroll, A.A. Milne and the Reverend Awdry and others, Tolkien told his son a story, then went to his study and wrote it down afterwards. These stories were collected as The Hobbit. The Hobbit tells the backstory to the Lord of the Rings, such as how Bilbo came to be in possession of the Ring, and introduces characters such as the Dwarves, Elves and Gandalf. It also tells the backstory of some of the enmity between characters who later form the Fellowship of the Ring. Later, when Tolkien’s son was serving in the army during WWII, Tolkien, who had served in WWI himself, returned to middle earth as letters to his son to pick his head up. All of this was in the foreward to my older edition to the Lord o
