J. R. R. Tolkien decided to increase the reader's feeling that the story in his 1954–55 book The Lord of the Rings was real, by framing the main text with an elaborate editorial apparatus that extends and comments upon it. This material, mainly in the book's appendices, effectively includes a fictional editorial figure much like himself who is interested in philology, and who says he is translating a manuscript which has somehow come into his hands, having somehow survived the thousands of years since the Third Age. He called the book a heroic romance, giving it a medieval feeling, and describing its time-frame as the remote past. Among the steps he took to make its setting, Middle-earth, believable were to develop its geography, history, peoples, genealogies, and unseen background (later published as The Silmarillion) in great detail, complete with editorial commentary in each case.
Tolkien considered giving his legendarium, including the character Elendil, an external frame in the form of a time travel novel. A character whose name, like Elendil's, means "Elf-friend", was to visit different historic periods, arriving at last in Númenor; but he never completed such a novel, despite two attempts.
The book was given a genuine editorial frame after Tolkien's death by his son Christopher Tolkien, who successively published The Silmarillion. Unfinished Tales, and eventually the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth. That set includes 4 volumes of The History of The Lord of the Rings. Christopher Tolkien provided detailed editorial commentary on the development of the stories of the whole legendarium and of The Lord of the Rings as a mass of contradictory drafts in manuscript.
Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy reframed the work as the tale of a dangerous adventure, omitting characters like Tom Bombadil and chapters like "The Scouring of the Shire" which deviated from Jackson's primary narrative, the quest to destroy the One Ring. The films attracted an enormous new audience, familiar with other media such as video games. Together, fans, game authors, and fantasy artists created a large body of work in many media, including a mass of fan fiction, novels, fan films, and artwork. Tolkien's impact on fantasy, principally through this one book, has been enormous; fantasy novelists have had the choice of either imitating Tolkien or of reacting against him. Scholars too turned their attention to book and films. These diverse contributions in many media provide a new, much wider context that frames and comments upon The Lord of the Rings.
Scholars including Vladimir Brljak have remarked Tolkien's construction of an editorial frame within the book. Brljak argues that this framework, with its pseudo-editorial, pseudo-philological, and pseudo-translational aspects, "is both the cornerstone and crowning achievement of Tolkien's mature literary work".[1]