Bilbo Baggins, comfortable in his hole in the ground, is swept into adventure by a wizard and thirteen dwarves seeking dragon's gold. Tolkien, an Oxford philologist, invented this world for his children and incidentally created modern fantasy. The prose moves from cozy domesticity to genuine terror, the riddle game with Gollum being the pivot on which everything turns. The finding of the ring seems almost casual here; no one yet knew what it would become. The book is a children's story that adults cannot outgrow, an adventure that is also about the cost of adventure.