John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (January 3, 1892 – December 2, 1973) was a writer, poet, philologist, professor at Oxford University, and the founder of modern fantasy. In 1937, The Hobbit was written, and in the mid-1950s, three Lord of the Rings books were published, telling about Middle–Earth, a world inhabited by representatives of magical races with a complex culture, history and mythology. There are over a dozen translations of the trilogy into Russian. This edition includes a translation by V. Carrick, M. Kamenkovich.