A Hobbit’s Guide to Stairs (forthcoming) reads The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) as the sequel to a short story told in J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’ (1937). The story pictures the Old English poem Beowulf as a tower the stairs of which modern critics have failed to climb, though from the top the builder once looked on the sea. In the sequel, one heroic Hobbit climbs to the topmost chamber of a tower to rescue another, who has already looked on the sea and at his end sails over it. Offering the first account of how the great Hobbit tale of the War of the Ring was made, The Guide ascends the stairs of an Elvish tower to unveil map the Third Age of Middle-earth and unveil the hitherto overlooked design of The Lord of the Rings.