At the other end of the difficulty spectrum is "The Silmarillion," a distillation of the legends and history of Middle Earth, from its creation myth to the War of the Rings. Many a readerly enthusiasm fueled by "The Lord of the Rings" has broken on the rockier shores of "The Silmarillion," but for aficionados, it's essential. Whatever you encountered in "The Lord of the Rings" and would like to learn more about -- from the history of Aragorn's ancestors to the skinny on Sauron's old boss to the life stories of Elrond and Galadriel -- can almost certainly be found here. But be warned that "The Silmarillion" is written in a very "high" style (to use Tolkien's own term), along the lines of the archaic sagas the professor so loved, rather than in the more modern voice of "The Lord of the Rings."

"The Silmarillion" was written before "The Lord of the Rings," but Tolkien made tinkering with it a lifelong hobby, and in the end it was edited by his son Christopher and published posthumously. The current hardcover edition comes with 20 color illustrations by Ted Nasmith, but they are, unfortunately, faintly cheesy in the lamentable tradition of much fantasy art. Still, it could be worse. It could be the Hildebrandt Brothers, who I'll get to shortly. (Christopher also edited the 12-volume "History of Middle-Earth," which comprises all of Tolkien's manuscript drafts related to his creation, but anyone advanced enough to covet that is far beyond any advice I have to give.)

So dense and extensive is Tolkien's invented world that people write reference books about it. Any serious exploration will be enriched by Robert Foster's "Complete Guide to Middle-Earth," an encyclopedia of characters, places and things with a few ideas thrown in for good measure. You can get a bit lost in this book; each entry is likely to mention a name you don't recognize and send you off to another entry and so on. It's a pleasant, meandering way to explore Tolkien's creation if you've got the patience for it, though if you just want to better identify one of the characters in, say, "The Silmarillion" or a collection like "Unfinished Tales," the guide can be frustrating. My chief complaint, though, is that the cover of the current paperback edition sports one of the Hildebrandt Brothers' clumsy, kitschy paintings, which makes it the kind of book you'd rather hide under the bed than leave out for company to spot.

Karen Wynn Fonstad makes the wiser decision to use an Alan Lee illustration on the cover of her "Atlas of Middle-Earth," an equally indispensable volume. The hundreds of maps and diagrams Fonstad has created or expanded upon make it much easier to enjoy the narrative in Tolkien's older lays and legends. They make it less of a struggle to keep the geography straight in your head and are a godsend to those of us who have a hard time following the action in battle scenes. Middle Earth changes drastically from its creation through the Third Age, when the action of "The Lord of the Rings" occurs, with large chunks of landscape disappearing into the sea. One treat in surveying the change maps of the realm lies in seeing the outlines of our own continents begin to emerge.

Tolkien had the notion that he was inventing a pre-history of our world, and his Elves, ents and dwarves are meant to be the inspiration for folk legends about fairies, nymphs and, well, dwarves. Finding his homeland of England lacking in a body of myths of its own, Tolkien aimed to create one, using elements from Germanic and Finnish mythology as well as some Celtic themes (though he was less than fully enchanted with the latter). Tom Shippey offers a solid account of how Tolkien went about doing this in "The Road to Middle-Earth" and a spirited defense of Tolkien's literary reputation in "J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century," a book that focuses on Tolkien's philological studies and makes a case for him as a literarily significant modern novelist. (Shippey's argument is explored in much greater depth in an essay by Salon's Andrew O'Hehir.)

A new book along the same lines is the lively and eminently readable "Myth and Middle-Earth," by Leslie Ellen Jones. A Celticist, she puts perhaps a bit too much emphasis on that cultural tradition relative to the Finnish, Anglo-Saxon and Norse legends that Tolkien loved better, but overall her look at the mythic "cognates" (a kind of recurring conceptual module, a bit like Jung's archetypes without the mystic tinge) that appear in Tolkien's invented lore proves fascinating. (And you gotta love a writer who can find a way to work the expression "suicide by cop" into a book about Tolkien.) Jones finds the roots of Tom Bombadil and his wife Goldberry in the elemental theme of the "Cosmic Couple," a bit of the trickster spirit in Gandalf, and an interesting splitting of the quintessential king-hero figure between Aragorn and Frodo, with Frodo shouldering the bulk of that figure's tragic destiny. She also provides pointers to the various mythic sources that spurred Tolkien's imagination (with recommended translations, too), making "Myth and Middle-Earth" a springboard to further exploration.

The craving for more Tolkien, though, needn't be satisfied solely with works about Middle Earth. Reading "The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien," edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien, is in many ways the closest you can get to an extra helping of "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings." I like to think the voice of Tolkien's letters resembles that of Bilbo Baggins -- if he'd been born human and acquired a professorship at Oxford, that is. Tolkien's letters are really the best source for what the author thought about the world he devised and the characters he created to populate it.

With so many fast and loose analyses of the "underlying values" of "The Lord of the Rings" flying around these days, it's helpful to have Tolkien's thoughts on politics, race, morality and religion spelled out in black and white. The acerbic letter he wrote in 1938 to a would-be German publisher of "The Hobbit" who had inquired whether he was of "Aryan extraction" is, alone, worth the cover price; apart from anything else, it's a fine example of how the elaborate indirection of politeness can be harnessed to deliver a stinging smackdown.

Humphrey Carpenter also wrote the definitive "J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography." While not really an exemplar of the form, it's accessible and engaging. Tolkien fought in the trenches of World War I and enjoyed a close friendship with C.S. Lewis, even if his was not an especially eventful life. The source of his prodigious inventive powers remains something of a mystery to the end. "His real biography," Carpenter writes, "is 'The Hobbit,' 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'The Silmarillion'; for the truth about him lies within their pages." The truth about more than just him, too, apparently, which is why so many of people have felt the urge to scribble in his margins.

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