by J.R.R. Tolkien, George Allen & Unwin, 1954, 479 pages

It’s been more than 50 years since “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first book of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, was initially published. While any author would be honored to be remembered so well after a half-century, surely Tolkien never foresaw that his life’s work of imaginative literature would not only endure, but become indelibly etched into the popular culture of the world like the fiery writing on the One Ring itself.

The book is still a great read in its own right, an epic adventure about a handful of home-loving hobbits who are swept up into a dangerous world of evil and magic, power and war. From their quite land of The Shire they are forced into a long journey across Middle-Earth in the company of a dwarf, an elf, a wizard and men from far-off kingdoms, first in flight from menacing Black Riders, and later with a perilous mission to destroy a magical ring in an effort to thwart the enemy, Sauron.

If it sounds like stock fantasy fare, it is, but that’s because Tolkien unwittingly created the mold from which much of the next half-century of fantasy writing would be cast. From Ursula K. Leguin to Robert Jordan, it’s hard to find a fantasy series that can’t trace at least part of its heritage back to the Ring trilogy. Tolkien didn’t just inspire imitators, he helped spawn an entire section of the bookstore.

It’s a solidly-written work, and even if you stripped out the fantasy elements there would still be left a heck of a road novel, full of careful description of the natural world which makes you want to grab your backpack and go. But the real magic in the books is the extraordinary effort that Tolkien put in to constructing the imaginary world in which they dwell. The different races have their own histories and cultures and languages and songs, to the point where passages appear in the Elven language which Tolkien painstakingly constructed. The reader is often given multiple names for a single place, as characters recite the different names that dwarves, elves and men might have for a single mountain or river, a device that elegantly echoes the cultural complexity of our own world and its languages.

At the time of publication, the books were sometimes criticized for a lack of depth in the characters, but they may only seem flat compared to the depth of the world around them. Tolkien originally intended the Ring trilogy to be published alongside “The Silmarillion,” a much denser work which was essentially a fictional history book, detailing the creation and ancient history of the races and lands of Middle-Earth. While “The Silmarillion” was not published until 1977, its presence is felt nonetheless, as it comprises the mythology and history that underpins “The Lord of the Rings.”

Tolkien’s shadow is longer even than the bookstore, however, and casts across genre. Not only do wildly popular online fantasy games such as “World of Warcraft” (10 million players and counting) trace their cultural lineage back to Tolkien, but the idea of simulation itself owes something to the intellectual exercise that Tolkien indulged in his writing. Simulation and world-building are mainstays of modern video games, whether they are set in a fantasy world or a more realistic setting, and the idea that a convincing narrative must happen in an open world-space with its own rules and not in a linear cause-and-effect narrative tunnel is essential to how they work. In that sense, “The Lord of the Rings” is an unwitting great-great-grandfather to “Grand Theft Auto IV.”

Re-reading “The Fellowship of the Ring”  today is not only fun, but full of those “Oh, that’s where that comes from!” moments that pepper the pages of truly great classic books.