The most popular book of the brilliant fantasy writer J. R. R. Tolkien. The Hobbit is primarily a fairy-tale story about the great journey of the wizard Gandalf, a company of dwarves and the hobbit Bilbo Baggins to find a treasure guarded by the dragon Smaug. In the second plan, however, it is one of the first stones of an extensive and world-famous cycle of stories, legends and myths from ancient Middle-earth, which made their author famous all over the world. The book The Hobbit was published by Tolkien in 1937 - quite without much interest. Even he probably had no idea that for him and for future readers it would become the gateway to the fascinating world of Middle-earth, which twenty years later would become the scene of the mythical battle between Good and Evil - the war for the Ring of Power, which he captured in the epic The Lord of the Rings.