The Lord of the Rings, said Tolkien, is a “tale that grew in the telling”. Almost 60 years after its first publication, that tale is still growing with next week’s release of The Fellowship of the Ring, part one of the pound;180 million film trilogy based on Tolkien’s tour de force.

This seven-year Herculean effort by director Peter Jackson is an awesome attempt to make flesh the pre-history of Middle-earth, with its epic struggles between good and evil, which John Ronald Reuel Tolkien began when the words “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” popped into his head.

The tale, which started life as a curious, archaic literary phenomenon and became a badge of counter-culture in the Seventies, has always had its devotees, but the film version has already fuelled a mass-marketing juggernaut on the lines of the Hogwarts Express. For this Christmas at least, and probably two to come (all three films are in the can, with The Two Towers and The Return of the King saved for future release), we will become a nation more obsessed than usual with parallel worlds full of trolls and giants, vengeful trees and dark lords bent on absolute power.

The fact that this is happening hard on the heels of Harry Potter fever highlights J K Rowling’s indebtedness to Tolkien, and delivers a new generation of readers hungry for longer fantasy adventures, just in time for the school holidays.

The high-budget, star-studded production (Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins, Cate Blanchett as the elf queen Galadriel) has opened the gates of Middle-earth to hordes of readers, including many who may previously have been reluctant to dive into a sturdy volume or three. Tolkien’s world has become accessible through the accompanying publications - new editions of the trilogy itself, film companions, audio-tapes - the return of the BBC’s excellent radio drama and the creation of a table-top battle game.

The heroic quest narrative has flowed from the pen of a retiring anti-modernist and philologist, an expert in the history and anatomy of languages, a professor of Anglo-Saxon and then English language at Oxford, on and on through 100 million copies (the combined worldwide sales of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) on to the big screen and out into cyberspace - 20 million people have downloaded the 90-second internet trailer.

Young people are undoubtedly drawn to this epic tale of the struggle between good and evil played out in an entire other world. They’ll tackle it from the age of nine, after The Hobbit (especially those whose parents are Tolkien fans - it is a book some fathers will happily read to their children), although most will read it from their early teens onwards. To a nation reared on “snappy bits”, as Tolkien once described our media, the book’s bulk is not necessarily a barrier. Indeed, young readers seem to revel in the intricate detail of Tolkien’s universe.

Tolkien’s grand saga follows the fortunes of Frodo Baggins of the Shire (played by Elijah Wood, who once played Huckleberry Finn), a hobbit who inherits a ring from his uncle Bilbo,who has been introduced in The Hobbit. After learning that it is the master ring of 20 ancient rings with the power to enslave the world, Frodo goes on a quest to destroy it before it falls into the hands of Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor. He is aided by his hobbit friends Samwise Gamgee, Merry, and Pippin, plus others including Gandalf the wizard and Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), also known as Strider, the lost human son of the true king of Gondor.

Tolkien did not see himself as the creator of a fantasy, but believed he was reaching back to a coherent, imaginative world that really existed, drawing on genuine mythic elements and linguistic structures from various Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and Scandinavian sources. Like it or loathe it (Edmund Wilson writing in 1956 described the trilogy as a “combination of Wagner and Winnie ThePooh”; critics were still fuming in 1997, when Waterstone’s customers voted it the top book of the 20th century), there’s no denying that those who have attempted to make it visual have striven to do justice to its complexity and serious purpose - despite Tolkien’s belief that the book was “very unsuitable for dramatic representation”.

Peter Jackson, a longtime fan of the book, has been obsessive in pursuit of “authenticity” in his three films: 350 constructed sets; 1,600 pairs of hairy latex hobbit feet; pioneering computer-enhanced imagery. The making of the film is itself a catalogue of heroic feats that Brian Sibley, who adapted The Lord of the Rings for an acclaimed BBC radio drama in 1981, documents enticingly in the official film companions. He tells how Jackson scoured his native New Zealand for locations, and crafted his special effects in his own Weta workshop, employing an armourer at an open forge and swordmakers who used Middle Ages techniques; how Alan Lee and John Howe, artists who have interpreted Tolkien, were drafted as consultants on the film, and their vision of Middle-earth translated into cinematic frames by Jackson.

Games Workshop, which produces the table-top Warhammer battle games (in which orcs and goblins slug it out with elves from the forest of Loren) and its futuristic version Warhammer 40,000, already owes much to Tolkien. The Nottingham-based company, which claims to be the largest hobby war games specialist in the world, won the tie-in rights with New Line Cinema, which is producing Jackson’s film, to make a Lord of the Rings game: the ultimate wish-fulfilment for a firm full of Tolkien fanatics.

Rick Priestley, creator of Warhammer, is also responsible for the The Lord of the Rings game. An archaeology graduate, he moved into designing fantasy figures largely because of his love of the book. As a boy, he painted toy soldiers and recreated historical battle scenes, but after reading The Lord of the Rings as a young teenager, he began to adapt his figures and games to scenarios from Tolkien’s mythical world, using poems and songs to flesh out his gaming characters as Tolkien did.

He joined Games Workshop almost 20 years ago, using his creative passion to help build a multi-million pound industry. He read Jackson’s script to create his game and based the character models on cast members; he believes it will draw youngsters into reading as much as gaming. He says: “It’s about imagery and epic storytelling. You don’t have to read the book to play the game, but the experience is richer if you do.”

The Library Association and the National Reading Campaign have seen the potential for encouraging young people to extend the reading habit, hard on the heels of Harry Potter. They have joined forces with Games Workshop for a national Lord of the Rings libraries promotion in February. Games Workshop staff will take the game into libraries, where the book, related guides and other fantasy fiction will be displayed, with figure-painting sessions and writing competitions also on the programme.

Eileen Armstrong, head of learning resources at Cramlington high school, Northumberland, invited local Games Workshop staff to demonstrate the game in the school library last month; it created a huge demand for the book. “The Games Workshop staff were superb,” she says. “They wanted to know right from the beginning how many kids had read the book, and referred to it throughout. I’ve had to order more copies.”

Jordan Humble, 13, who was at the event, had already bought the game and is on his third reading of the book. He says: “I love the detail Tolkien put into it. Harry Potter is too basic by comparison.”

The film will stir those who haven’t read the book to wonder what happens in volumes two and three. As Brian Sibley writes in his Insider’s Guide for primary aged pupils: “Two years is a long time to wait if you want to know how the story ends. In the meantime, of course, you could do what the young Peter Jackson did many years ago - pick up a copy of the book and discover for yourself one of the most unusual and unforgettable tales ever told.”

‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ (PG) is on general release from December 19