The next big thing: Tolkien becomes lord of the spin-offs

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Fantasy, Recovery, Consolation and Escape (and that's just for adults)

It could be magic. Or it could simply be the power of Hollywood. JRR Tolkien's extraordinary saga of wizardry and magic, The Lord of the Rings, has long been regarded as a 20th-century classic. Voted the people's favourite in poll after poll, for decades its publishers have been able to bank on annual sales of half a million.

But now the adventures of Frodo Baggins and Gandalf the wizard are proving so lucrative to HarperCollins that, without spending a penny on promotion or marketing, they have seen sales of the books soar by 400 per cent in a single year.

This phenomenon may have something to do with the $300m (£200m) movie version of The Lord of the Rings due to open in Britain and the US on 19 December. Driven by the excitement surrounding the film, interest in Tolkien's Middle Earth saga has been stirred to an unprecedented degree.

Only now are copies of the book branded with stills from the film replacing the author's distinctive drawings on the cover, and the customary range of picture-led tie-in titles will only be unveiled in November. But in the past two months alone, stores have sold more copies of The Lord of the Rings than the annual total of only a couple of years ago.

A constant buzz has surrounded the Rings trilogy since the director Peter Jackson began 15 months of filming in New Zealand in 1999 in one of the most ambitious book-to-film adaptations of all time.

All of this has been generated with a subtle trickle of publicity, via the internet and a small number of carefully controlled events, contrasting sharply with the deafening fanfare of promotion surrounding Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the winter's other blockbuster.

Yet while the Harry v Hobbit battle is the one in the public eye, industry observers are suggesting that the real fight will be that faced by George Lucas, maker of the Star Wars movies.

With the Lord of the Rings trilogy being released over the next three Christmases, Mr Lucas risks his follow-ups to the poorly received Phantom Menace being eclipsed by a story started by an Oxford academic as long ago as 1917.

Using 20,000 extras and more than 1,200 computer-generated special effects, the three-film project stars Sir Ian McKellen as the good wizard Gandalf, Sir Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins, Cate Blanchett as the elf queen Galadriel and Christopher Lee as the bad wizard Saruman. The second film in the sequence will be released in December next year with the third 12 months later.

It has already captured the imagination of both Tolkien buffs and movie fans. When the first trailer was broadcast on the internet, it prompted an unprecedented 1.7 million hits in the first 24 hours – nearly twice that for Phantom Menace. The official website has now received 420 million hits. But nobody predicted this advance surge of interest in the original written word.

David Brawn, the publishing director of HarperCollins' Tolkien list, said yesterday: "We thought we would sell books, but not until the film came out. Yet it seems people are reading them now to get up to speed."

They had known there was huge anticipation and book sales in New Zealand were excellent from the moment filming began. "But we can't quite keep up with how it's going," Mr Brawn said. "The film has given Lord of the Rings a currency which was undreamt of even a couple of years ago."

The first book in the trilogy was published in 1954 and the sequence has notched up an estimated 100 million sales worldwide in 50 languages. It was named book of the century in a 1997 Waterstone's poll.

Humphrey Carpenter, who wrote a biography of Tolkien, said yesterday that the books were pioneering. "There is so much fantasy around now, but there had been nothing like it before, that was so substantial and had to be taken seriously."

Mr Carpenter, who as a schoolboy met Tolkien and described him as "charming ... rather like a hobbit himself", said he would be going to see the movie. "It sounds as if it's been done lavishly, although Tolkien thought it wouldn't transfer to another medium." The writer's surviving three children have said they will not be going, as part of a policy of rarely commenting on their father and his legacy.

But members of the Tolkien Society, which is dedicated to encouraging interest in his work, are keen. Ian Collier, the society's spokesman, said it was "no bad thing because it's bringing people to the books". Asked to explain the appeal of The Lord of the Rings, he said: "For me, it's the magic, the wonder and enticement, the people, what is going on, where they are. You get really caught up in it."

With the arrival of Harry Potter on the big screen on 4 November, David Brawn said comparisons between the two films were inevitable but not entirely fair. "They're both family films and they're both must-see films," he said. But the trailers already running in cinemas showed the differences. "Harry Potter has a real sense of magic and mystery. But Lord of the Rings is faster-moving, quite dark, and plays up the drama."

Cam Winstanley, features editor of Total Film magazine, which includes Lord of the Rings posters in this month's edition, said the real point of comparison was with the Star Wars phenomenon. "Certainly LucasFilms are treating this trilogy as very serious competition to the next Star Wars film," he said. Apart from the Bible, Lord of the Rings is one of the biggest-selling books of all time. You've got this entire mythology behind it. It's a marketing dream."

Which leaves David Brawn from HarperCollins with just one headache: "We and the Tolkien family are worried that there is a genuine risk of burn-out, that at the end of it, there will be nobody left to read this book and we'll then suffer," he said. "Once every household has a copy of the book, there's nobody else to sell it to."