J. R. R. Tolkien's first steps in laying the foundations of Middle-earth—what would essentially come to be known as his Legendarium—can be traced as far back as 1914, when he started working on a set of narratives in a process he described as mythopoeia, where a fictionalized mythology is created by an author like himself. After the unprecedented critical and financial success of The Hobbit, the first book published in Tolkien's Legendarium, the publishers desperately wanted a sequel. The Lord of the Rings came to Tolkien slowly, but that only allowed him to flesh out the world, characters, and stories of Middle-earth in a way that fantasy literature had never seen before. Upon publication, the massive three-volume novel achieved only moderate success, and it wouldn't be until the '60s and '70s that paperback and unauthorized editions would allow its reputation to take off.
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