The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien – There Are No Words, and Then There Are All of Them

52 Books in a Year – Week 13

I went into The Return of the King with an agenda. I want to be upfront about that because I think it shaped the experience in ways worth being honest about. The Return of the King is my favourite film of all time. Not my favourite fantasy film. My favourite film, full stop, in the entirety of cinema history, a medium I have spent a significant portion of my professional life thinking about. Peter Jackson's third instalment is, in my view, one of the great achievements in the history of popular storytelling on screen. So I went into the book with a question I very much wanted answered.

Is this my favourite book of all time?

I read it. I finished it. I sat with it. And then I nearly pulled my hair out.

Because here is what I discovered, and what took me longer to make peace with than I would like to admit. The Return of the King is not better than Fellowship. It is not better than Two Towers. And Fellowship is not better than Two Towers. And Two Towers is not better than Return of the King. Because they are not three books. They are one book. One enormous, extraordinary, morally serious, mythologically vast, deeply human book that was published in three volumes for reasons of paper and binding costs in post-war Britain and has been argued about as a trilogy ever since, to the considerable confusion of readers who keep trying to pick a favourite part of something that was never meant to have parts.

Tolkien said so himself. He called it a novel. One novel. And once I accepted that, once I stopped trying to rank the volumes against each other and simply let the whole thing sit in my head as the single work it actually is, something clicked into place that I had been reaching for across the last three weeks of this challenge.

The Lord of the Rings is the best book I have ever read. All of it. At once. Together.

Right. Now let's talk about the ending.

The Weight of What Has Been Carried

Return of the King opens with Pippin and Gandalf riding hard for Minas Tirith and barely stops moving for the first half of the book. After the divided, slower burn of Two Towers, this feels almost shocking. Tolkien lets the pace off its chain and the result is some of the most propulsive writing in the trilogy.

But what I want to talk about first, before the battles and the kings and the moments that have become so embedded in cultural memory that they almost cease to feel like surprises, is the weight. By the time we arrive in Return of the King, every character in this story is carrying something that has accumulated over thousands of pages and years of in-world time. Frodo is barely himself anymore. Sam is holding Frodo together through willpower alone. Aragorn has been running from his own name his entire adult life and can no longer afford to. Gandalf is fighting a war on every front simultaneously, visible and invisible, and doing it without the luxury of anyone fully understanding what he is actually doing or why.

Tolkien earns the ending of this book because he has made you feel every mile of the road that leads to it. That is the work of all three volumes paying off in this one. And this is why the single novel argument matters so much to me now. If you read Return of the King without Fellowship and Two Towers you get a spectacular conclusion. With them, you get something that hits in a place that most fiction simply cannot reach.

Minas Tirith

Let me say something about Minas Tirith that I think sometimes gets lost in discussions of this book. It is a city in decline. Like Rohan, like Lothlórien, like almost every great civilisation in Middle-earth, it is magnificent and it is fading and the people inside it know it. Denethor, the Steward, is not simply a villain. He is a man who has looked into a palantír, one of the seeing stones, and has been shown carefully selected truths by an enemy who understands exactly how to use the truth as a weapon. He has seen what is coming and he has concluded, with a cold and terrible rationality, that it cannot be survived.

He is wrong. But his wrongness is not stupidity. It is despair, which is a different thing entirely and considerably more sympathetic. Tolkien writes Denethor with a generosity that the films, understandably given the constraints of screen time, do not quite manage. He is a great man broken by knowledge he was not built to carry alone. There is something in that which resonates well beyond the fantasy context.

The Pelennor Fields

I am not going to attempt to describe the Battle of the Pelennor Fields in any comprehensive way because Tolkien spent a great deal of his life building the literary and mythological tools necessary to describe it and I have a blog to finish. What I will say is this.

The Rohirrim arriving at dawn is the single greatest cavalry charge in the history of literature. I will hear arguments but I will not change my position. Tolkien builds to it across two full books, across the entire weight of Rohan's story, the diminished king restored, the people gathered, the impossible odds accepted, and then he delivers it with a simplicity and a force that is almost physical. You feel it. In your chest. Like hoofbeats.

And then Éowyn. I said in the Two Towers entry that Tolkien does more with her than he is sometimes given credit for. Return of the King is where the account is settled in full. She stands over the Witch-king of Angmar, the lord of the Nazgûl, the creature that no living man can kill, and she takes her helmet off. The moment is so perfectly constructed, so carefully seeded across three volumes, that it lands with the force of something inevitable. Of course it is her. It could only ever be her. Tolkien knew it from the moment he put her at that window watching the riders leave.

The Cracks of Doom

Here is the thing about the ending of the quest that Tolkien does which I think is genuinely brave and which the films handle with tremendous fidelity. Frodo fails.

At the last moment, at the literal edge of the fire where the ring must be destroyed, after everything, after all of it, Frodo cannot do it. He puts the ring on. He claims it. The quest, in its purest form, fails at the final step because the ring has been destroying him the whole way there and by the end there is not enough of him left to resist it.

Gollum saves the world. Gollum, wretched and broken and consumed by a love for the ring that is indistinguishable from madness, takes it and takes himself into the fire and ends it. And the reason Gollum is still alive to do this, the reason he has not been killed along the way, is because of the mercy shown to him by Bilbo in a cave under the Misty Mountains at the beginning of The Hobbit, extended by Frodo across the whole of the journey in the face of Sam's perfectly reasonable objections.

The world is saved by accumulated mercy. By a chain of small compassions stretching back across four books. That is not a fantasy ending. That is a theological statement dressed in the clothes of adventure, and it is one of the most sophisticated moral arguments I have encountered in any fiction in any genre.

The Scouring of the Shire

I want to spend a moment here because this section, which the films omit entirely, is in some ways the most important in the book and the one that reveals most clearly what Tolkien was actually writing about.

The hobbits return home to find the Shire industrialised, polluted, controlled by petty men exercising small power in ways that are somehow more immediately horrible than anything they encountered in Mordor. And the hobbits, changed by everything they have been through, have to deal with it themselves. Gandalf is not there. Aragorn is not there. There is no wizard to fix it. There are just four hobbits who went away as comfortable stay-at-homes and came back as something else entirely, and a home that needs them to be what they have become.

Tolkien was writing this in the 1940s, watching industrialisation do to the English countryside what it had been doing since he was a child, and the anger in this section is personal and specific and completely earned. The Shire is not just a fantasy setting. It is something he loved and something he watched being diminished. The Scouring is his reckoning with that.

The films leaving it out makes sense for reasons of pace and runtime. Its absence is still a loss.

The Grey Havens

And then the ending. The actual ending.

Frodo cannot stay. That is the truth of it, stated quietly and without melodrama. He has carried something that has left a mark that the Shire cannot heal and time cannot reach. He goes to the Grey Havens with Gandalf and Bilbo and the last of the elves, and he sails west, and Sam watches the ship until it is gone and then turns and rides home to his family and his life and the garden he has always loved.

And the last line of the book, Sam's last line, spoken to his wife as he comes through the door, is so simple and so precisely right that I am not going to quote it here. I am going to tell you to read it. Read all of it, all one book of it, and arrive at that last line and see what it does to you.

It will do something. I promise you that.

What The Lord of the Rings Actually Is

I started this challenge at the beginning of the year with the Epic of Gilgamesh. A story about a king who loses his closest friend and cannot accept that he too will die and goes to the ends of the earth looking for a way out of mortality and comes home with the knowledge that there is none. About learning to live inside your limits. About what you leave behind.

I have read the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Aeneid and the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and the Norse Eddas and Beowulf. And all of them, every single one, has been circling the same questions. What does it mean to be alive. What do you do with the time you have. What do you owe the people beside you. What do you leave when you go.

The Lord of the Rings asks all of those questions and answers them with more warmth and more depth and more human feeling than almost anything else I have encountered in this challenge or outside it. It is not the oldest story on this list. It draws from the oldest stories. It inherits from them and transforms them and gives them back to us in a form that a reader in any century can hold and recognise and feel the truth of.

It is one book. It is the best book. All of it, together, at once.

I nearly pulled my hair out working that out. I am glad I did.

Final Verdict

★★★★★ (5/5)

For The Return of the King. For The Two Towers. For The Fellowship of the Ring. For The Hobbit. For seventeen years of a man pouring his soul on the page for our escapism. I take my hat off to Tolkien, and forever hope his IP is handled with respect.

Next Up: The Silmarillion to tie off Tolkien