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Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of Eriador lies a small unregarded countryside.
In this land is an utterly insignificant little green town whose men-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think smoking is a pretty neat idea.
This town has--or rather had--a problem, which was this: most of the people living in it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of lots of small birthday gifts, which is odd becuse on the whole it wasn't the gifts that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with weed-pipes.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming from Bree in the first place. And some said that even Bree had been a bad move and that no one should ever have left the Anduin.
And then, one Mid-Year's Day, over three thousand years after one maiar had gotten his finger cut off for trying to rule the world, a wizard sitting on his own at a small inn in Bree suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and he finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and (hopefully) no one would have to get any digits cut off.
Sadly, before he could arrange to get a letter sent, he made a mistake and headed South, and the idea was lost for ever.
This is not his story.
But it is the story of that mistake, and some of its consiquences.
It is also the story of a ring, a ring called 'The One Ring'--not a Shire ring, never made in the Shire, and until after the mistake occured, never seen or even heard of by any but a few Shire-folk.
Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable ring.
In fact, it was probably the most remarkable ring ever to come out of the great smoking mountain of Orodruin, of which few Shire-folk had ever heard either.
Not only is it a wholly remarkable ring, it is also a highly dangerous one--more dangerous than Vilya, more suductive than Nenya, and more destructive than Narya.
The One Ring scores over these older, more pedestrian works in two important respects.
First, it has a mind of it's own, and second, it has the words 'Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul' inscribed in large friendly elven-script on its exterior.
But the story of this Mid-Year's Day, the story of it's extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable ring begins very simply.
It begins with a Hobbit-hole.