Franchise · Tertiary · since 1954
The Lord of the Rings
The trilogy every fantasy since has been quietly measured against. Nine walkers against nine riders, twenty rings, and one road from Bag End to Mount Doom.
Speak, friend, and enter.
The West-gate of Moria
The best puzzle in the book, and the joke is that it is not a puzzle at all. Gandalf spends hours trying every opening spell he knows because he has mistranslated his own inscription. It does not say speak the password and enter. It says say “friend” and enter. The door was never locked to anyone willing to be neighbourly, which is a very Tolkien idea about how doors, and people, ought to work.
The trilogy every fantasy since has been quietly measured against, and it earns that by being built from the ground up rather than the top down: languages first, then histories, then a map, and only then a story walking across it.
The inscription
Invisible until the ring is put in a fire, and then written in the letters of the elves, in the language of Mordor, which Gandalf refuses to speak aloud in the Shire.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.
Tolkien built the languages first and the story second, which is why the couplet scans in both tongues and why the world underneath it holds up to this much reading.