The Hobbit
or There and Back Again; the tale of the Quest of Erebor
The Book
The Hobbit; or There and Back Again was Tolkien’s first published tale of Middle-earth — the story of the comfortable hobbit Bilbo Baggins who is given a quest by Gandalf with the dwarves of Thorin, and of his wanderings from the Shire to the Misty Mountains, through Mirkwood and Lake-town, to the Lonely Mountain and the dragon Smaug.
The Ring
In the caverns of the Goblins, Bilbo found the One Ring in the dark and met the creature Gollum; the book’s later editions told that riddle-truth of the Ring, making it the gateway to the great history of the War of the Ring.
Standing
The story of a companionable adventure, rooted in the legendarium and told at first as a fireside fairy-tale; it stands as the prelude to The Lord of the Rings.