Tolkien's first published fiction in 1937 was The Hobbit, subtitled or There and Back Again. It was written as a freestanding children's story within the world of Middle Earth. It became, however, with significant revisions of the Ring finding episode, the prelude for the whole of ord of the Rings.

Although J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion was published posthumously in 1977, he was working on it as early as 1917. It is a narrative of the Elder Days, beginning with Eru, the One, Ilúvatar, the creator, and ending with the downfall of Númenor and the changing of the world so that there was no longer a straight passage to the Deathless lands. Unlike The Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings, it makes little or no use of modern novelistic conventions. Christopher Tolkien writes in the Foreword that...