hen the final DVD of the three Lord of the Rings movies appears, sometime in mid-2004, the books they bring to the screen will be 50 years old.   The fantasy masterpiece saw its first appearance on July 29, 1954, with the release of the first edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book of the trilogy. Written by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, professor of the language known as Old English (or Anglo-Saxon), The Fellowship of the Ring drew good if not overwhelming reviews, but managed the all-important step of generating interest in the remaining two volumes. The Two Towers appeared on Nov. 11 of that same year, with The Return of the King, by now eagerly anticipated, seeing publication almost a full year later, on Oct. 20, 1955.   All were published in England, by Allen & Unwin, who had previously published (in 1939) his children's novel, The Hobbit, which Tolkien had written largely as a story for his own children. In fact, the trilogy began as a simple sequel to The Hobbit, a request of the publisher and based on letters from readers who wanted to learn more about hobbits and their world. But by that time Tolkien had amassed a collection of legends, stories, and myths about Middle-Earth, his created world, and despite early efforts he couldn't hold the new story to a children's tale. The Lord of the Rings, with its quarter-million words, took him 12 years to complete.   The Lord of the Rings tells the story of the hobbit Frodo Baggins, who comes into the possession of the immensely powerful and overwhelmingly evil One Ring, an item that threatens to destroy all he holds dear.   The ring belongs to Sauron, an ancient enemy of Middle-Earth, and in fact contains the essence of Sauron's being. With the help of three other hobbits, Gandalf the wizard, Gimli the dwarf, Legolas the elf, and two men, one of whom seeks to reclaim the throne of the free West, Frodo must make his way, against enormous odds, from his quiet home in the pastoral Shire to the utterly devastated land known as Mordor. There he must throw the One Ring into the fire in which it was created.   Tolkien never intended the story as a trilogy, insisting on its publication as a single volume. But the 1950s economy in England, still recovering from World War II, made printing an expensive proposition, and reluctantly Tolkien agreed to split the novel into three parts. In doing so, he unknowingly launched the market known today as the fantasy trilogy, a concept that became popular not only in the book world, but in film as well.   Early reviews of The Lord of the Rings ranged from high praise (from the influential poet W. H. Auden) to deep scorn (from the influential literary critic Edmund Wilson). But the truly important critics, as always, were the buyers, and here the trilogy scored well right from the start. Still, it wasn't until the next decade that the books truly took off: the counterculture university campuses of the 1960s took Tolkien's work to heart, probably because of the story's essential idealism, and The Silmarillion, Tolkien's final work, became one of the most anticipated books of the 1970s. Published in 1977, four years after Tolkien's death, The Silmarillion showed the author at his least compromising and most myth-inspired, and the word "hobbit" never appears once.   Nobody knows the extent of Tolkien's readership. It was already internationally huge by the middle of the '60s, and it continued to grow throughout the '70s. Christopher Tolkien, the author's son, kept the whole thing going after The Silmarillion (which he edited and collated with the help of Canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay) with a series of books with additional unpublished material and early drafts of the trilogy.   The trilogy routinely placed high on readers' lists of the top novels of the 20th century, and is taught in schools worldwide.   The one certainty is that this immense fan base is highly protective of Tolkien and his works, a fact that Peter Jackson, the director of the current movie version, knew very well. For this reason, he opened the official Web site for the movies (lordoftherings.net) long before the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, to show readers how carefully he was treating the whole thing. For the most part, reaction from the Tolkien fan base has been highly positive. - Neil Randall (Editor's note: This is the first of three parts about The Lord of the Rings. Pick up the next two issues of Tribute for the rest of the story.)