The Return of the King

The Return of the King

LC Class		PR6039.O32 L6 1954, v.3
Preceded by	The Two Towers

The Return of the King is the third and final volume of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, following The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. It was published in 1955. The story begins in the kingdom of Gondor, which is soon to be attacked by the Dark Lord Sauron.

The volume was praised by literary figures including W. H. Auden, Anthony Price, and Michael Straight, but attacked by Edwin Muir who had praised The Fellowship of the Ring.

The chapter "

.

Title and publication

The Return of the King was in the end published as the third and final volume of The Lord of the Rings, on 20 October 1955 in the UK.[4]

Contents

Some editions of the volume contain a synopsis for readers who have not read the earlier volumes. The body of the volume consists of books five and six. Book six has variously been titled The Return of the King (clashing with the title of the third volume) and The End of the Third Age, though in many editions the Books are untitled. The volume ends with a set of appendices and an index, varying in different editions.

Book V: The War of the Ring

Sauron sends a great army against

from the same fate.

, though at great cost; Théoden is among the dead.

Aragorn enters Minas Tirith and heals Faramir, Éowyn, and Merry. He leads an army of men from Gondor and Rohan, marching through Ithilien to the Black Gate to distract Sauron from his true danger. At the Battle of the Morannon, his army is vastly outnumbered.

Book VI: The End of the Third Age

Meanwhile, Sam rescues Frodo from the tower of Cirith Ungol. They set out across Mordor. When they reach the edge of the

, Frodo cannot resist the Ring any longer. He claims it for himself and puts it on. Gollum suddenly reappears. He struggles with Frodo and bites off Frodo's finger with the Ring still on it. Celebrating wildly, Gollum loses his footing and falls into the Fire, taking the Ring with him. When the Ring is destroyed, Sauron loses his power forever. All he created collapses, the Nazgûl perish, and his armies are thrown into such disarray that Aragorn's forces emerge victorious.

Aragorn is crowned King of Arnor and Gondor, and weds Arwen, daughter of Elrond. Théoden is buried and Éomer is crowned King of Rohan. His sister Éowyn is engaged to marry Faramir, now Steward of Gondor and Prince of Ithilien. Galadriel, Celeborn, and Gandalf meet and say farewell to Treebeard, and to Aragorn.

The four hobbits make their way back to the Shire, only to find that it has been taken over by men directed by "Sharkey" (whom they later discover to be Saruman). The hobbits, led by Merry, raise a rebellion and

to find peace.

Appendices

The appendices outline more details of the history, cultures, genealogies, and languages that Tolkien imagined for the peoples of Middle-earth. They provide background details for the narrative, with much detail for Tolkien fans who want to know more about the stories.

Appendix A: "Annals of the Kings and Rulers"

Provides extensive background to the larger world of Middle-earth, with brief overviews of the events of the first two Ages of the world, and then more detailed histories of the nations of Men in Gondor and Rohan, as well as a history of the royal Dwarvish line of Durin during the Third Age.

The embedded "

, giving up her immortality.

Appendix B: "The Tale of Years" (Chronology of the Westlands)

Provides a timeline of events throughout the series, and ancient events affecting the narrative, and in lesser detail, it gives the stories' context in the fictional chronology of the larger mythology.

It tells that Sam gives his daughter Elanor the fictional

). It says that there was "a tradition" that after handing over the book, Sam crossed west over the sea himself, the last of the ring-bearers; and that some years later, after the deaths of Aragorn and Arwen, Legolas and Gimli also sailed together "over Sea".

Appendix C: "Family Trees" (Hobbits)

Gives hobbit genealogies – not only for Bilbo and Frodo's Baggins family, but also their relations the Tooks and Brandybucks, which connect them to Pippin and Merry.

Appendix D: "Calendars"

Describes some of the calendars used by the characters in the story, and explains that the Roman month names in the text are "translations" of the names in the hobbits' calendar. (Tolkien was a linguist, and provided Germanic-sounding names for the hobbit calendar by extrapolating names of German and Old English months forward to what he thought they might have become if all were still used in modern English, as Yule and Easter are.)

Appendix E: "Writing and Spelling"

Describes dwarves' runes and the elvish runes use by the other peoples of Middle-earth; the names of the runes and letters incidentally give a bit of information about dwarvish and elvish languages.

Appendix F: "Languages and Peoples of the Third Age" and "On Translation"

Presented as two sections. In addition to outlines of the various languages in current use during the narrative, and mentioned or seen in the story, it discusses hobbits' names at length. It sorts out names which Tolkien affected to have translated into English, and names which said he had left in original form (since they had no meaning in hobbits' everyday language).

Reception

Of the volume

Further information: Literary reception of The Lord of the Rings

In a review for The New York Times, the poet W. H. Auden praised The Return of the King and found The Lord of the Rings a "masterpiece of the genre".^[5] The science fiction author and critic Anthony Boucher, in a review for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, praised the volume as "a masterly narration of tremendous and terrible climactic events", but wrote that Tolkien's prose "seems sometimes to be protracted for its own sake".^[6] The author

The novelist and publisher

The Scottish poet and critic

Of "The Scouring of the Shire"

narrative arcs balancing the main text on the quest to destroy the One Ring in Mordor with The Scouring of the Shire^[12]

Critics have considered the volume's penultimate chapter, "The Scouring of the Shire", the most important chapter in the whole of The Lord of the Rings. Although Tolkien denied that the chapter was an

Of "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen"

Tolkien called "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen", in the appendices at the end of the volume, "really essential to the story".

See also

• The History of The Lord of the Rings

Notes

References

1. ^ "The Return of the King". Between the Covers. Retrieved 28 December 2010.
2. ^ Carpenter 2023, #136 to Rayner Unwin, 24 March 1953
3. ^ Carpenter 2023, #140 to Rayner Unwin, 17 August 1953
4. ^ Carpenter 2023, #172 to Allen & Unwin, 12 October 1955
5. ^ Auden, W. H. (22 January 1956). "At the end of the Quest, Victory". The New York Times.
6. ^ Boucher, Anthony (1956). "Recommended Reading". F&SF (July 1956): 92.
7. The Oxford Mail
   .
8. ^ ^{a b c} Thompson, George H. (1985). "Early Review of Books by J.R.R. Tolkien: Part III". Mythlore. 12 (1): 58-63 (article 12).
9. ^ Straight, Michael (16 January 1956). "The Fantastic World of Professor Tolkien". The New Republic. No. 134. pp. 24–26.
10. ^ Muir, Edwin (22 August 1954). "Review: The Fellowship of the Ring". The Observer.
11. ^ ^{a b} Muir, Edwin (27 November 1955). "A Boy's World". The Sunday Observer. p. 11.
12. ^ ^{a b} Birns 2012.
13. ^ Donnelly 2018.
14. ^ Richards & Witt 2014, p. 138.
15. ^ Colebatch 1989.
16. ^ Colebatch 2007.
17. ^ Shippey 2001, pp. 166–168.
18. ^ Dickerson & Evans 2006, pp. xvii–xviii, 215–234.
19. ^ Kocher 1974, p. 28.
20. ^ Hirsch 2014.
21. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
    . 23 (1): 1–3.
22. ISBN 978-0-618-39113-4
    .
23. ^
    S2CID 162244172
    .
24. OCLC 298788493
    .
25. ISBN 978-0-8126-9806-0
    .
26. ^ Shippey 2005, pp. 229–230.
27. OCLC 228503211
    .

Sources

• JSTOR 24353144
  .
• ISBN 978-0-35-865298-4
  .
• ISSN 0033-5002
  .
• Colebatch, Hal G. P. (2007). "Communism". In Drout, Michael (ed.). The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment. CRC Press/Taylor & Francis. pp. 108–109.
• ISBN 0-8131-7159-8
  .
• Donnelly, Jerome (2018). "Nazis in the Shire: Tolkien and Satire". Mythlore. 37 (1). Article 6.
• Hirsch, Bernhard (27 November 2014). "After the "end of all things": The Long Return Home to the Shire".
  S2CID 170501504
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• ISBN 978-0-14-003877-4
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• ISBN 978-1-58617-823-9
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• ISBN 978-0261-10401-3
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• ISBN 978-0261102750
  .

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to The Return of the King.

• The Return of the King at the Internet Book List