The Lord of the Rings was published in 1954 and is, for a lot of readers, simply the fantasy series. Tolkien’s epic more or less created the modern genre and still sits at its foundation, which is exactly why so many people go looking for books like Lord of the Rings the moment they turn the last page.
It’s known for its grand world-building, its rich invented history, its languages, and half the furniture the genre still uses: wizards, dragons, magic, swords, and the long quest across a map. With around 150 million copies sold, it’s also one of the best-selling novels ever written in any genre.
Here’s the problem with most lists like this one. Search for books like Lord of the Rings and you’ll get the same twenty fantasy series every time: Mistborn, The Wheel of Time, A Song of Ice and Fire, The First Law. Those are good books. Several are great books. But they’re recommended because they’re popular epic fantasy, not because they resemble Tolkien in any meaningful way. A Song of Ice and Fire is deliberately anti-Tolkien: low magic, political, morally grey, allergic to myth. The First Law spends three volumes dismantling exactly the story Tolkien told. Recommending those to someone who just finished the trilogy and wants more of that feeling is a category error.
So this list works differently. Every entry is here because it shares something specific with Tolkien: the writers who directly influenced him, the friends he argued with about myth, the books openly built on his template, and a couple of deliberate outliers that deliver his particular effects through completely different means. Where the connection is documented, I say what it is. Where the book is here because it produces the same feeling rather than because of any lineage, I say that too.
If you want the broader field of great epic fantasy, that’s my list of the best fantasy books. This one is about Tolkien.
Fiction by René Rehn
The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
The best place to start a list of books like Lord of the Rings is with the book that came first.
The Hobbit tells the story of Frodo’s uncle Bilbo, who opens his door one morning to find Gandalf on the step and, before long, thirteen dwarves in his dining room, all of them intent on dragging him across the world to win back a treasure guarded by the dragon Smaug.
Let’s be honest about what it is, though. It’s a children’s book, and it reads like one. The story is simpler, the stakes are smaller, and the prose doesn’t come close to the mythic grandeur of The Lord of the Rings. It’s episodic, with each chapter working almost as its own little adventure, and the tone is gentle in a way the trilogy never is.
None of that is a reason to skip it. Anyone who’s read The Lord of the Rings owes it to themselves to go back to Bilbo’s original adventure, if only because the whole trilogy grows out of one chapter here. “Riddles in the Dark,” where Bilbo meets Gollum in the tunnels and pockets a certain ring, is the best thing in the book and the hinge the entire legendarium swings on.
It’s a quick read, it’s charming, and it makes everything that follows land harder.
The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien
If The Hobbit is where the story starts, The Silmarillion is where the world does.
It collects the mythology and history of Middle-earth, some of it written as far back as the 1910s, reaching all the way to the First Age and the creation of Arda itself. Much of it doesn’t read like a novel at all. The tales are closer to folklore, legend, and scripture, told at a distance and in a register that owes as much to the Eddas and the Bible as to modern fiction.
That’s also the problem. It’s dense, it’s complex, and it throws hundreds of names, places, and terms at you with very little handholding, which is the main reason it never approached the popularity of the trilogy. Tolkien never finished it either; his son Christopher assembled and edited it after his death.
Push through and it’s the richest world-building document in the genre, and among books like Lord of the Rings there’s nothing else quite like it. If you loved Middle-earth for the sense of enormous depth behind every ruin and half-remembered song, this is where all of that actually lives.
Unfinished Tales and The Fall of Númenor by J. R. R. Tolkien
For readers who finish The Silmarillion and still want more Middle-earth, the well goes deeper than most people realize.
Unfinished Tales gathers longer, more detailed versions of stories the published works only gesture at: Gandalf’s account of how the quest for Erebor actually came about, the tale of the Rohirrim, more on the Istari and the palantíri. Because these pieces are fuller and more novelistic than the compressed legends of The Silmarillion, plenty of readers find them a friendlier way in.
The Fall of Númenor, edited by Brian Sibley and published in 2022, does something different. It pulls Tolkien’s scattered writings on the Second Age into a single chronological narrative, covering the rise and drowning of Númenor and Sauron’s long manipulation of it. If you watched the Amazon series and wanted the real thing, this is it.
Neither of these is a novel, and neither pretends to be. They’re for readers whose search for books like Lord of the Rings really means more of Middle-earth itself. For anyone whose actual question is “how do I stay in this world longer,” they’re the answer. The rest of the posthumous shelf, sorted by who it’s for, is on my Tolkien books guide.
The Well at the World’s End by William Morris
Start at the source. If you want to know where Tolkien’s mode came from, it came substantially from here.
William Morris published this in 1896, and it brought to full scale the thing Morris had first attempted in The Wood Beyond the World: fantasy in an entirely invented world with no framing dream, no allegory, and no apology. Ralph, the youngest of King Peter’s four sons, defies his father and rides out to seek a well whose waters grant long life and fortune, and travels through a landscape of towns, forests, and warring lordships rendered in archaic, deliberately medieval prose.
The Tolkien connection is documented rather than speculative. Both men went to Exeter College, Oxford. Both loathed industrialization and wrote fiction proposing a pre-industrial alternative. Tolkien took from Morris the habit of weaving poems, songs, and proverbs directly into prose narrative, and scholars have traced specific Morris works onto specific Tolkien creations: The Roots of the Mountains toward Gollum, The Wood Beyond the World toward Lothlórien and Fangorn, and Morris’s translation of a Norse saga toward the name Wormtongue.
The archaic language is the barrier, and it’s real. Morris wrote in a consciously antique English that takes some acclimatizing. Push through and you get the landscape-heavy, journey-shaped, myth-saturated storytelling that Tolkien inherited and refined.
Among books like Lord of the Rings, this is the ancestor rather than the descendant.
The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison
Published in 1922, thirty-two years before The Fellowship of the Ring, and nominally set on the planet Mercury, a conceit the book abandons almost immediately in favor of a world it mostly just calls earth, and occasionally even Middle Earth.
The Lords of Demonland are called upon by an emissary of Gorice XI, warlock king of Witchland, to submit. They refuse, and a war unfolds across an entire world, told in a Shakespearean, Jacobean-inflected prose that no one has attempted since.
Tolkien read it, met Eddison at the Inklings, and praised him in a letter, calling him the greatest and most convincing writer of invented worlds he had ever encountered. He also, in the same letter, said Eddison’s philosophy was rebarbative and his names badly made, and denied direct influence. Eddison, for his part, considered Tolkien’s views soft. C. S. Lewis loved it. Ursula Le Guin called it an eccentric masterpiece.
What it offers the Tolkien reader is the thing Tolkien himself valued in it: a completely self-contained secondary world, rendered with total conviction and no winking. The heroism is grand, the treachery is grand, and nothing is ironized.
Fair warning on two counts. The prose is genuinely archaic and demands patience, and the frame story that opens the book is abandoned entirely and never resolved, which irritates some readers permanently. Neither problem has stopped it being called the greatest high fantasy of them all by people whose opinion is worth something.
The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
Lewis and Tolkien were friends and colleagues at Oxford, bonded over Norse mythology, and read each other’s drafts aloud in the same pub. That connection alone makes Narnia essential context for anyone reading books like Lord of the Rings.
The best-known entry sends four children, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy, out of wartime London to Professor Kirke’s house, where a wardrobe opens onto a snowbound country ruled by the White Witch and waiting for a lion named Aslan.
Where Tolkien drew on Norse and Germanic myth, Lewis reached for the classical world and whatever else caught his eye, which is why Narnia contains fauns, minotaurs, and Father Christmas without apology. Tolkien famously disliked that magpie approach.
It’s written for children and it’s shorter and simpler than anything else here, but the series has held adult readers for seventy years. The Christian allegory is there and impossible to miss; how much that bothers you is personal.
The Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin’s Earthsea is often named the fantasy series second only to Tolkien’s in importance, and it’s still somehow underread next to the doorstoppers.
It’s the story of a boy named Duny, later Ged, whose magical talent is spotted by his aunt and then properly trained by the mage Ogion, before he goes on to the school of wizardry on Roke. Yes, a school for wizards, written decades before Harry Potter.
Ged is the interesting part. He’s arrogant, prickly, and rubs nearly everyone the wrong way, which makes his fall so much sharper when his pride summons something he can’t control. What follows is less an epic quest than a long reckoning with his own shadow.
Among books like Lord of the Rings, Earthsea is usually compared to The Hobbit rather than the trilogy, and that’s fair: it’s a coming-of-age story at heart, focused on one person’s growth rather than the fate of the world. The world-building is superb and the prose is spare and beautiful, closer to fable than to modern fantasy.
The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson
Published in 1954, the same year as The Fellowship of the Ring, and the two books are a fascinating study in divergence.
Anderson took the same Norse material Tolkien drew on, the sagas, the Eddas, the cursed sword and the doomed hero, and produced something considerably harsher. A human child is stolen by elves and replaced with a changeling; both grow up, and both are destroyed by what they are. The elves here are not Tolkien’s Elves. They’re beautiful, cruel, amoral, and closer to what the actual folklore describes.
The reason it belongs on any list of books like Lord of the Rings is that it demonstrates what Tolkien chose. Same sources, same year, same tragic Norse register, and a completely different moral universe. Reading them together tells you more about Tolkien’s decisions than any biography will.
Of all the books like Lord of the Rings here it’s the shortest and the cruelest, and its influence runs directly into Michael Moorcock and everything downstream of him. Anderson revised it in 1971 into a tamer version; seek out the 1954 text.
The Shannara Series by Terry Brooks
Plenty of fantasy novels have been accused of imitating Tolkien. The Sword of Shannara caught more of that accusation than any other book in the genre, and honestly, the opening chapters earn it: a quiet valley, a hidden heir, a wizard arriving to sweep him away, and Wraith-like pursuers on the road. The parallels are impossible to miss.
Stick with it, though, and the story turns into something else. Shea’s quest for the Sword resolves far faster than Frodo’s, and from there the series spirals outward into sequels, spin-offs, and eventually science-fantasy, spanning thousands of years of invented history.
That accumulated depth is what gives Shannara the same mythic weight that made Tolkien’s world feel real. Some of the standard fantasy tropes in the early books also turn out, much later, to be something entirely different, which is a genuinely clever long game.
The first book has real problems. The series that grew out of it is one of the most sprawling in fantasy, and one of the more rewarding books like Lord of the Rings once it finds its own feet.
The Dragonlance Chronicles by Weis and Hickman
The Dragonlance books came out of Dungeons & Dragons, and they wear it openly.
What Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman did was take a shared game world and populate it with characters memorable enough to outlive their origins. Raistlin Majere in particular, the sickly, ambitious, morally compromised mage, is one of the great characters in gaming-adjacent fiction.
The books are unashamedly built from tropes: dragons, elves, dwarves, a party of adventurers assembled almost exactly as you’d roll one up at a table. Sometimes it’s over the top. It’s also enormous fun, and the emotional beats land harder than the setup suggests they should.
If you want more epic stories about elves, halflings, and dragons, and you don’t need them to reinvent anything, these are among the most purely enjoyable books like Lord of the Rings you’ll find.
Legend by David Gemmell
David Gemmell doesn’t turn up on many lists like this one, which is a small crime. Ask fantasy readers who’ve been at it for decades and Legend comes up constantly.
The setup is beautifully simple. The fortress of Dros Delnoch is the last thing standing between a massive invading horde and the heart of the empire. It cannot hold. Everyone knows it cannot hold. Druss the Legend, an aging axeman well past his prime and famous across the world, comes to defend it anyway.
That’s the whole book, and it’s magnificent. Gemmell wrote about courage, aging, and doing the right thing when it’s clearly futile, and he wrote it without a shred of sentimentality. His prose is lean, his battles are visceral, and his heroes are old, tired men who show up regardless. Few books like Lord of the Rings understand that particular kind of courage as well.
If the part of Tolkien that moves you is Théoden riding out at Helm’s Deep knowing the odds, Gemmell wrote an entire career of that. Start here.
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The rabbit book, which sounds like a joke until you read it and realize it’s a Tolkienian quest narrative with the fantasy furniture stripped out.
A warren is destined for destruction. A small group leaves before it happens, crosses a landscape that is enormous and lethal at their scale, and searches for somewhere to found a new home, encountering societies along the way that each represent a different failed answer to how to live.
The Tolkien resemblance is structural and deliberate. Adams built his rabbits a language, Lapine, with its own vocabulary and idioms. He gave them a mythology, with El-ahrairah as trickster-hero, and interleaved those legends through the narrative exactly as Tolkien interleaves songs and older tales. The journey is mapped onto real Hampshire terrain with the same specificity Tolkien applied to Middle-earth.
What you get is the thing people actually miss from The Lord of the Rings: a small band of ordinary creatures on a long dangerous journey, sustained by loyalty and storytelling, in a world with depth behind it.
It’s also considerably darker than its reputation, and it isn’t a children’s book despite being marketed as one for decades.
Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
A 1926 novel that Neil Gaiman has called one of the finest in English, and which almost nobody has read.
The free state of Dorimare borders Fairyland and has spent generations pretending otherwise. Fairy fruit is contraband, the very word is unspeakable in polite company, and the mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist is a comfortable man who wants nothing to do with any of it. Then his son eats the fruit.
It belongs here for its treatment of the boundary between the mundane and the numinous, which is the same territory Tolkien worked. The Shire and Faerie sit next to each other in both writers, and both are interested in what happens when the ordinary world can no longer keep the older one out.
The prose is lovely, wry, and considerably lighter on its feet than most fantasy of any era, and the book turns from pastoral comedy into something genuinely strange by its final third.
An unfairly forgotten book, and the deepest cut among these books like Lord of the Rings.
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
The last unicorn in the world learns she’s the last, and leaves her forest to find out what happened to the others.
What earns it a place among books like Lord of the Rings is the elegiac register. Tolkien’s trilogy is, underneath the war, a book about the passing of an age: the Elves are leaving, the magic is draining out of the world, and winning the war doesn’t stop that. Beagle wrote a whole novel in exactly that key. It’s about wonder receding, and about what’s left for the people who remember it.
Beagle’s prose is the other reason. It’s funny, lyrical, and occasionally devastating in the space of a paragraph, and the book is quotable to a degree few fantasy novels manage.
It’s short, it’s not a quest epic, and its concerns are Tolkien’s concerns, which is the only test that matters here.
The Odyssey by Homer
Two entries here aren’t fantasy in the modern sense at all. This is the first of them, and it’s on the list as the archetype the whole genre descends from.
The Odyssey follows Odysseus after the Trojan War, trying to sail home to Ithaca and spending ten years failing to get there. Along the way: the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, a trip to the underworld, and a homecoming that’s less a reward than a final test.
It’s routinely named one of the two foundational texts of Western literature, and its influence on the fantasy quest is not a stretch. The long journey home, the monsters guarding each stage, the hero defined by trials, the episodic structure where each stop is its own story: Tolkien was a scholar of exactly this tradition, and the shape of the quest didn’t come from nowhere.
It’s the oldest of the books like Lord of the Rings here by nearly three thousand years, and it still reads well. Get a good modern translation. Emily Wilson’s is fast, clear, and easy to live with, and the poem moves much better than its reputation suggests.
Titus Groan and Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
The second outlier, and the strangest thing on this list.
There is no magic in Gormenghast. No wizards, no dragons, no elves, no quest. What there is instead is a castle: an enormous, crumbling, near-infinite pile where an ancient family lives out rituals nobody remembers the purpose of, governed by rules more rigid than any magic system. Into this arrives Steerpike, a kitchen boy with ambition and no scruples, who begins climbing.
The reason it belongs here is the prose. Peake wrote some of the most beautiful sentences in English fiction, dense and grotesque and unbelievably vivid, and the castle becomes as real and as mythic as any invented world in the genre. It’s the same grand, deep-history atmosphere that makes Middle-earth feel lived in, just turned inward and confined to a single vast building. Peake was also an illustrator, and it shows: every room and every face is drawn.
The honest warning: it’s slow. Very slow. The plot in the first book barely moves, and if you’re reading for incident you’ll bounce off it hard.
If what you loved about Tolkien was the language and the atmosphere rather than the swords, this might be the best of all the books like Lord of the Rings here for you. If it was the swords, skip it. Peake the painter, poet, and illustrator is covered on my Mervyn Peake guide.
Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams
Now back to fantasy proper, and to one of the finest examples of it.
Osten Ard is a continent where humans, the troll-folk Qanuc, and the immortal, elf-like Sithi have held an uneasy peace under King John the Presbyter. When the old king’s health fails, that peace goes with it, and something far older begins to stir beneath the world.
Simon, a kitchen boy who knows nothing about any of this, gets swept into it, which is exactly the right choice of protagonist. Early on he’s less a hero than a bystander being dragged along, and that makes the whole thing land closer to the reader.
I read the entire series and loved it. The world-building is openly reminiscent of Tolkien but it goes darker, and the Sithi are the best example: elves who are genuinely alien and not remotely benevolent. Pryrates, the red priest, is an all-time favorite antagonist of mine, a straightforwardly evil man who’s terrifying precisely because he’s so unhidden about it.
Where it stumbles is when Williams reaches for Tolkien’s trick of inventing vocabulary and languages, which never quite convinces. That’s forgivable. Nobody rivals Tolkien at that, and as books like Lord of the Rings go, this one is a triumph on every other front. It’s also the series that directly inspired George R. R. Martin to write A Song of Ice and Fire. Martin’s own shelf is mapped on my George R. R. Martin guide.
Hi, great list! One addition – the Stormlight Archive series from Brandon Sanderson is also a good one for this list! I like it even better than Mistborn