The Return of the King

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Return of the King arrived in United Kingdom bookshops on the 20th of October 1955. It was the third and final volume of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The questions it raised have occupied readers and scholars ever since. What made its reception so divided, with reviewers calling it both a masterpiece and a boy's adventure story? Why would scholars single out a chapter about hobbits restoring their home village as the most important in the entire novel? And why did Tolkien describe a love story he placed in the back matter as essential to the whole plot? Those answers begin with a disagreement about the book's very name.

• 2. A Title Contested

  ›

  Tolkien conceived of The Lord of the Rings as one novel in six books, not three separate volumes. In 1953, he proposed individual titles for all six books directly to his publisher, Rayner Unwin. Book Five was to be called The War of the Ring. Book Six would be The End of the Third Age. Unwin chose to publish the work as three volumes instead. He combined books five and six with the appendices to form the final volume and gave it the title The Return of the King. Tolkien felt the chosen title revealed too much of the story and said he preferred The War of the Ring. Both of Tolkien's preferred book titles did eventually reach readers in print. The Millennium edition, released in 2000, used them within the text for the first time.

• 3. The Scouring of the Shire

  ›

  Critics have called "The Scouring of the Shire" one of the most famous anticlimaxes in literature. The penultimate chapter brings the four hobbits home after Sauron's defeat. They find their countryside occupied by men working for a figure called Sharkey. The hobbits rise up, drive out the invaders, and uncover Sharkey's true identity as Saruman, the fallen wizard. Tolkien confirmed that a chapter of this kind was planned from the very outset of the novel. Its specific details, however, were not settled until late in the writing process. He weighed other identities for the wicked Sharkey before landing on Saruman.

  Tolkien conceived the chapter as a counterbalance to the main plot. Where the main quest followed a physical journey to destroy the One Ring, this chapter required a moral one. Purifying the Shire meant accepting personal responsibility for one's own home. Despite that moral frame, Tolkien denied that the chapter was an allegory for postwar Britain. Even so, commentators have found specific contemporary political references woven into it. Some see a satire of socialism. Others find echoes of Nazism, allusions to postwar British shortages, and a strand of environmentalism. The chapter ends not with triumph but with a death at Bag End, Frodo's home. Gríma Wormtongue kills Saruman there, then is shot down by hobbit archers a moment later.

• 4. Essential to the Story

  ›

  Tolkien called "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen," tucked into the appendices, "really essential to the story." That claim might seem odd for a narrative that never appears in the main text. Tolkien gave two reasons for its exclusion. The tale covers events both before and after the main narrative's timeline, making it structurally difficult to embed in the story proper. And the novel is narrated from the hobbits' perspective; the love story of Aragorn and Arwen is not theirs to tell.

  The tale mirrors an earlier story in Tolkien's mythology: the "Tale of Beren and Lúthien." That earlier story also concerns the love between a Man and an Elf, set in a previous age of Middle-earth. Scholars note that this technique resembles Dante's approach in his Inferno. Both writers embed historical echoes to give their fictional worlds a sense of deep time. The themes scholars have drawn out include the nature of love and death, and a tension Tolkien navigated deliberately. He was a Roman Catholic and considered The Lord of the Rings a fundamentally Catholic work. Yet Middle-earth societies have no religions of their own, and the tale's characters live and think as pagans. That paradox is woven into the text without resolution. Scholars have noted one further consequence: by placing the love story in the appendices, the novel shifts its emotional emphasis toward action. Arwen's immortality was the price of the marriage, a sacrifice the appendix explores at length while the main text gives it little room.

• 5. Critics Divided

  ›

  W. H. Auden, reviewing The Return of the King in The New York Times, called The Lord of the Rings "a masterpiece of the genre." Anthony Boucher, writing for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, praised the volume as "a masterly narration of tremendous and terrible climactic events." He added a reservation: Tolkien's prose, in his view, sometimes seemed protracted for its own sake.

  Anthony Price, reviewing for The Oxford Mail, called the novel "more than immense; it is complete." He described Middle-earth as "an absolutely real and unendingly exciting world" and singled out Gollum, the Ents, and Tom Bombadil for their characterization. Price argued that the One Ring was destroyed "with terrifying logic." He welcomed the hobbits' return to the Shire as a coda that put the larger events in perspective.

  Michael Straight, a novelist and publisher writing in The New Republic, connected the book's physical landscapes to Tolkien's biography. The devastated terrains in the novel, Straight wrote, recalled Tolkien's experiences in the First World War. The snowstorm in the Misty Mountains echoed a climbing trip Tolkien made in Switzerland. The Shire itself, in Straight's reading, reflected England. His review of the full novel ended by calling it a work of genius.

  Edwin Muir, the Scottish poet and critic, had praised The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954. He attacked the completed work a year later in The Sunday Observer. Muir dismissed it as "a boy's adventure story" and compared it to the works of Rider Haggard. Except for "a few old wizards," Muir wrote, all the characters were "boys masquerading as adults." The same year those reviews appeared, the book's appendices were available to readers who wanted to look past the controversy. There they found the deeper architecture of the world Tolkien had built.

• 6. Beyond the Story

  ›

  The "Annals of the Kings and Rulers" section reaches back to the first two Ages of the world, long before the main narrative begins. It then traces more detailed histories for the nations of Men in Gondor and Rohan, as well as the royal Dwarvish line of Durin throughout the Third Age. The "Tale of Years" serves as a complete chronology for the fictional world. It records that Sam eventually gave the Red Book of Westmarch to his daughter Elanor. That book contained Bilbo's autobiographical account and Frodo's record of the War of the Ring. Tolkien framed it as his source for both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, presenting himself as a translator rather than an author. A tradition recorded in the same section holds that Sam later crossed west over the sea, becoming the last of the ring-bearers.

  The "Calendars" section reflects Tolkien's training as a professional linguist. The months used by the hobbits carry Germanic-sounding names. Tolkien invented them by extrapolating old German and Old English month names, imagining how they might have evolved in English, as Yule and Easter did. The "Writing and Spelling" section describes the runes used by dwarves and the elvish runes used by other peoples. The names of those letters yield incidental information about dwarvish and elvish languages.

  The language appendices, gathered as "Languages and Peoples of the Third Age" and "On Translation," address the hobbits' names directly. Some names Tolkien treated as translations from the hobbits' own language into English. Others he left in their original form, because they had no meaning in everyday hobbit speech. The genealogy section, "Family Trees," traces the kinship of Bilbo and Frodo's Baggins family. It connects them through their relations the Tooks and Brandybucks to Merry and Pippin. The "Tale of Years" records one further departure. Some years after the deaths of Aragorn and Arwen, Legolas and Gimli sailed over the sea together. That final image closes the book on a world Tolkien never quite stopped building. An Elf and a Dwarf sailing west together suggests a history extending even beyond the appendices.