The first edition was published on 29 July 1954 in the United Kingdom, and consists of a foreword in which the author discusses the writing of The Lord of the Rings, a prologue titled "Concerning Hobbits, and other matters", and the main narrative divided into two "books".

Scholars and critics have remarked upon the narrative structure of the first part of the volume, which involves comfortable stays at five "Homely Houses",[a] alternating with episodes of danger.

Different reasons for the structure have been proposed, including deliberate construction of a cosy world, laboriously groping for a story, or Tolkien's work habits, which involved continual rewriting.

Tolkien called "The Shadow of the Past" the "crucial chapter" as it changes the tone of the book, and lets both the protagonist Frodo and the reader know that there will be a quest to destroy the One Ring.

The prologue explains that the work is "largely concerned with hobbits", telling of their origins in a migration from the east, their habits such as smoking "pipe-weed", and how their homeland the Shire is organised.

Bilbo celebrates his eleventy-first (111th) birthday and leaves the Shire suddenly, passing the Ring to Frodo Baggins, his cousin[d] and heir.

Gandalf informs Frodo that the Black Riders are the Nazgûl, Men from ancient times enslaved by Rings of Power to serve Sauron.

She allows Frodo and Sam to look into her fountain, the Mirror of Galadriel, to see unexplained visions of the past and the present, and possibly unreal glimpses of the future.

Galadriel's husband Celeborn gives the Fellowship boats, elven cloaks, and waybread (Lembas), and they travel down the River Anduin to the hill of Amon Hen.

Firstly, the Hobbit protagonists, having set out on their adventures, repeatedly return to "Homely Houses", comfortable and safe places where they recuperate.

[5][6][7] Secondly, Frodo many times confers and eats with an advisor (not necessarily in a "Homely House"), then makes a clumsy journey in the face of a danger, then encounters unexpected help.

[5][6][7] In 1982, the Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey noticed the alternation at the start of The Lord of the Rings between moments of dangerous adventure and of recuperation.

[5] In search of material, Tolkien indulged in "a sort of self-plagiarism",[9] repurposing and expanding his own earlier inventions from, for instance, the poem "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil" which he had written in 1934.

Finally, Tolkien allowed himself a measure of whimsical fun, describing the delicious meals the Hobbit protagonists were able to enjoy when each adventure was over, singing cheerful songs in the form of poems embedded in the text, taking hot baths in Crickhollow, and most pleasurably, constructing humorous dialogue.

"[11] In A Tolkien Compass, the scholar of literature David M. Miller describes The Lord of the Rings, like The Hobbit before it, as a "there and back again" tale "with various digressive adventures upon the way".

Shippey suggests that these structures might have been "created in part by Tolkien's work habits, rewriting continually", in many small stages like waves of an incoming tide, "each one rolling a little further up the beach.

[7] The poet W. H. Auden wrote a positive review in The New York Times, praising the excitement and saying "Tolkien's invention is unflagging, and, on the primitive level of wanting to know what happens next, The Fellowship of the Ring is at least as good as The Thirty-Nine Steps.

[17] The scholar Loren Eiseley wrote in the New York Herald Tribune that Tolkien's was "a major creative act", constructing a "great tapestry ... rich with all manner of invention and of symbols, of the peculiar ethnology of a created world".

"[19] The novelist H. A. Blair, writing in the Church Quarterly Review, stated that the work told "poetic truth", appealing to "unconscious archetypes", and that it was a pre-Christian but religious book, with Christian "echoes and emphasis".

[22] Tolkien's friend and fellow-Inkling C. S. Lewis wrote in Time and Tide that the book created a new world of romance and "myth without allegorical pointing", with a powerful sense of history.

"[24] The novelist Naomi Mitchison praised the work in The New Statesman and Nation, stating that "above all it is a story magnificently told, with every kind of colour and movement and greatness.

[26] He commented that if Tolkien had had the "sensibility or the style to express the particular degree of humanity which we find in Spenser and Ariosto and Malory", and his imagination "equal to his invention", "this book might have been a masterpiece".

[14] This is because it represents both the moment that Tolkien devised the central plot of the book, and the point in the story where the protagonist, Frodo Baggins, and the reader realise that there will be a quest to destroy the Ring.

These include a sense of the depth of time behind unfolding events,[30] the power of the Ring,[31] and the inter-related questions of providence, free will, and predestination.

Contrary to the maxim "Show, don't tell", the chapter consists mainly of people talking; the action is, as in "The Shadow of the Past", narrated, largely by the Wizard Gandalf, in flashback.

[15] The Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge writes that the chapter brings the hidden narrative of Christianity in The Lord of the Rings close to the surface.