The Fellowship of the Ring is Volume 1 of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
The volume begins with Bilbo Baggins’s birthday party and Frodo’s inheritance of the One Ring. Frodo eventually leaves the Shire with Samwise Gamgee, encounters danger on the road, and reaches Rivendell, where the Fellowship is formed.
The book ends after the Fellowship’s journey through Moria and Lothlórien, when the company’s unity begins to break apart. Its final chapters set up the separate storylines followed in the next two volumes.
Although readers often describe The Lord of the Rings as a trilogy, Tolkien conceived it as one continuous novel. Publication and printing constraints led the publisher to issue it in three volumes: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King.