The discovery of the One Ring ignites the great war between good and evil in Middle-earth, as a courageous group of adventurers embarks on a perilous quest to destroy the dangerous artifact. Reissue. (A New Line Cinema film, the first in three feature films based on The Lord of the Rings trilogy. (Science Fiction & Fantasy) J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973), beloved throughout the world as the creator of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, a fellow of Pembroke College, and a fellow of Merton College until his retirement in 1959. His chief interest was the linguistic aspects of the early English written tradition, but even as he studied these classics he was creating a set of his own.